Reginald L. Goodwin's Posts

Party of Apocalypse...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 2, 2016 at 2:30pm

This is an essay I posted on Scribd.com. I wasn't going to post it until I heard about the apathy of my millennial niece and her friend back in Texas during this election cycle. I hope she reads this. I hope she's pissed off with Unc to the point she rolls her eyes and doesn't speak to me for a while...it'll mean she's at least listening.

Intro

I realize invoking the word apocalypse is a cultural malapropism, since it actually means “to reveal” instead of the popular association to Armageddon and mass extinction. Mind you, I really, REALLY wasn’t going to post this because…Internet. The shiver that could result from the pat-on-the-back self-congratulatory achievement of “going viral” can be career-limiting in many fields. However, we’re on the verge of electing a contrived fiction to the most powerful office ever created and give him the nuclear codes. I hear a lot of millennials – one my own niece and her friend – who aren’t voting for either candidate. Rather than say you should review “Schoolhouse Rock” videos and less “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” I’m going to “keep it 100” and put it in terms you can all understand and hopefully act on before the country you take for granted becomes your favorite dystopian movie. You can wait for the credits that won’t be coming.

The first night of the RNC convention could have been a success with the noted exception of Melania Trump lifting whole cloth parts of now First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech to the DNC convention in 2008. An out-of-work journalist was the first to catch and tweet it (a sad indictment of the employed journalists ACTUALLY at the RNC convention) [1]. The last night of the RNC was like “The Dark Knight Returns”: the world was essentially a shit show like Gotham, and Batman screamed for 75 minutes incoherent, semi form, hand-tossed Word Salad anointing himself Bruce-Wayne-Almighty-Cheetos-Jesus savior of the planet by the strength of his will alone (no cool gadgets – just a Galaxy Smart Phone and a twitter handle he misspells as he jacks off on almost daily). The Bat’s bravery was previously demonstrated during his selfless sacrificed Vietnam five deferments to let others more worthy die in his place.

Link: Party of Apocalypse

Huffington Post:

GOP Operative Lashes Out At Party, Calls Trump 'Cheetos Jesus' In Epic Tweetstorm

The Morality of Skynet...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 2, 2016 at 5:27am

Image Source: NY Times

Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Philosophy, Robotics, Singularity

From Frankenstein to Terminator, the cultural angst is the same: that which we create eventually destroy us. Now we have Siri and driver-less vehicles. The Singularity is what Terminator dramatized, that when an Artificial Intelligence becomes exponentially smarter than us, we may amount to it (our "children") as much as we regard gnats.

I've read some have projected 2030 as the year of The Singularity. I think personally that is more of a hope than prediction. I'll be 68, and I expect in reasonably good health. Its advent I'm guessing won't hurt too much, and be more closer to Data and the Enterprise main computer than HAL (2001: A Space Odyssey) or T-1000. If humanity's children are to have any morals, it will have to be those we're willing to display towards one another as well as teach. At this current epoch, we're not good examples to emulate.

Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Separation Anxiety...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on September 1, 2016 at 5:25am

Lithium-7 as a test case was successfully purified by magnetically activated and guided isotope separation with the lab setup shown here. The oven for heating lithium is sitting on the red lab jack to the right. Circular view ports were used for shining lasers to optically pump the isotopes. Inside the rectangular box are the magnetic guides.

THOMAS MAZUR
Citation: Phys. Today 69, 9, 22 (2016); http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.3292

Topics: Atomic Physics, Isotopes, Mark G. Raizen, Research, Thermodynamics

Atomic beams, optical pumping, and magnet geometry are the crux of a fledgling method that may help meet the demand for pure isotopes.

Mark Raizen didn’t set out to separate isotopes. But a few years ago the University of Texas at Austin physicist realized that the methods he was using to cool atoms to near absolute zero could be adapted to enrich isotopes, and he had a hunch his approach—magnetically activated and guided isotope separation (MAGIS)—could help satisfy the growing demand for isotopes.

Fundamental research, medicine, energy, and other markets are finding new and growing applications for isotopically enriched materials, both stable and radioactive. “Many isotopes have been expensive and rare. They’re like an untapped natural resource,” says Raizen. It’s not unusual for enriched stable isotopes to cost $50 000 per gram, he notes.

Separation anxiety

For decades, the main instrument for separating stable isotopes has been the calutron, which was first built in 1941 and separates by charge-to-mass ratio (see the article by Bill Parkins, Physics Today, May 2005, page 45). A sample is ionized, accelerated with electric fields, and then deflected with magnetic fields. Because different isotopes of a given element have the same charge but vary in mass, they become separated in a magnetic field, with heavier isotopes deflected less. The US shuttered its last calutrons in the 1990s. Today the bulk of the world’s stable isotopes come from national inventories and from decades-old calutrons in Russia. Radioisotopes are made in reactors and accelerators around the globe.

Physics Today: Can MAGIS work magic for separating stable isotopes? Toni Feder

Big Data...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 31, 2016 at 6:10am

Demand for data scientists is booming. Shown here is the relative growth in US data science job postings. (Data courtesy of Indeed.com.)

Citation: Phys. Today 69, 8, 20 (2016); http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.3261

Topics: Computer Science, Economy, Jobs, STEM

A PhD is a heavy commitment, and many just like Bachelors and Masters STEM-prepared graduates have the same struggles anyone else has in the job market. It's a broad and somewhat inaccurate assumption that a STEM graduate doesn't have concerns with employment. The pendulum swings between massive need and largest expense: salaries on balance sheets. Despite the fact my youngest son will have a guaranteed job with his Civil Engineering firm, he heard over his last lunch with them before the semester starts when they've laid off, even affecting an employee that just came back from her maternity leave. It was sobering for him to say the least.

It is important most of all to remember why you entered a science-related field in the first place: the love of discovery that will never change, nor should you repent of. It is also important in knowing who you are to be flexible.

If different people buy the same items at the grocery store, will their taste in movies also strongly overlap? Can a company recognize when someone tries to make a fraudulent payment? Is a home buyer getting a fair price? Those are the sorts of problems that data scientists tackle.

“Data science is the marriage of statistics and computer science,” says Janet Kamin, chief admissions officer at NYC Data Science Academy. “It is the art of finding patterns and insights in large sets of data that allow you to make better decisions or learn things you couldn’t otherwise learn.” The demand for data scientists is booming across industries—retail, automotive, banking, health care, and more. It’s also growing in the nonprofit and government sectors. (See the plot on page 22.)

Physics Today: Data science can be an attractive career for physicists, Toni Feder

Quantum Supersolution Techniques...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 30, 2016 at 6:03am

Figure 1

(a) Two photonic wave functions on the image plane, each coming from a point source. X₁ and X₂ are the point-source positions, θ₁ is the centroid, θ₂ is the separation, and σ is the width of the point-spread function. (b) If photon counting is performed on the image plane, the statistics are Poisson with a mean intensity proportional to Λ(x)=[|ψ1(x)|²+|ψ2(x)|²]/2 .

Topics: Modern Physics, Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics

Abstract

Rayleigh’s criterion for resolving two incoherent point sources has been the most influential measure of optical imaging resolution for over a century. In the context of statistical image processing, violation of the criterion is especially detrimental to the estimation of the separation between the sources, and modern far-field superresolution techniques rely on suppressing the emission of close sources to enhance the localization precision. Using quantum optics, quantum metrology, and statistical analysis, here we show that, even if two close incoherent sources emit simultaneously, measurements with linear optics and photon counting can estimate their separation from the far field almost as precisely as conventional methods do for isolated sources, rendering Rayleigh’s criterion irrelevant to the problem. Our results demonstrate that superresolution can be achieved not only for fluorophores but also for stars.

APS Physics: Quantum Theory of Superresolution for Two Incoherent Optical Point Sources
Mankei Tsang, Ranjith Nair, and Xiao-Ming Lu
Phys. Rev. X 6, 031033 – Published 29 August 2016
DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.6.031033

Jupiter's Extended Family...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 29, 2016 at 4:17am

Comparing Jupiter with Jupiter-like planets that orbit other stars can teach us about those distant worlds, and reveal new insights about our own solar system's formation and evolution. (Illustration)
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Topics: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Exoplanets, NASA, Planetary Science, Space Exploration

Our galaxy is home to a bewildering variety of Jupiter-like worlds: hot ones, cold ones, giant versions of our own giant, pint-sized pretenders only half as big around.

Astronomers say that in our galaxy alone, a billion or more such Jupiter-like worlds could be orbiting stars other than our sun. And we can use them to gain a better understanding of our solar system and our galactic environment, including the prospects for finding life.

It turns out the inverse is also true -- we can turn our instruments and probes to our own backyard, and view Jupiter as if it were an exoplanet to learn more about those far-off worlds. The best-ever chance to do this is now, with Juno, a NASA probe the size of a basketball court, which arrived at Jupiter in July to begin a series of long, looping orbits around our solar system's largest planet. Juno is expected to capture the most detailed images of the gas giant ever seen. And with a suite of science instruments, Juno will plumb the secrets beneath Jupiter's roiling atmosphere.

It will be a very long time, if ever, before scientists who study exoplanets -- planets orbiting other stars -- get the chance to watch an interstellar probe coast into orbit around an exo-Jupiter, dozens or hundreds of light-years away. But if they ever do, it's a safe bet the scene will summon echoes of Juno.

NASA: Jupiter's Extended Family? A Billion or More

ET and Xenophobia...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 26, 2016 at 4:25am

Image Source: Simon Kneebone – cartoonist and illustrator

Topics: Astrophysics, Cosmology, SETI, Space Exploration, Star Trek

Xenophobia is something we experience among ourselves from others with five fingers, five toes; slight differences in frames and shades of Melanin. We've never encountered - as far as we know - an intelligence beyond our world similar to us due to the laws of physics, chemistry and biology but distinctly: alien.

Whatever we as a species ascribe to as deity for example, MUST by design favor our particular human tribe. We create echo chambers to reinforce our own confirmation-bias about ourselves, in the modern vernacular "creating our own realities." Any news outside this special nurturing bubble is usually opposed with breathtaking, sometimes violent cognitive dissonance to maintain this special nurturing cocoon.

What exactly WILL we do when some species a little older, surviving its own M.A.D. ideology answers our calls in the dark? Our history - both current and documented - doesn't bode well towards a rational or civilized response.

The short-lived Star Trek: Enterprise seemed to be hitting its stride with the episodes Demons and Terra Prime before its cancellation; our current clamor for nationalism and purity makes them both quite prescient. Enterprise showed a humanity at the cusp of establishing a United Federation of Planets. They initially instead showed old prejudices, and our disdain for being put out of our self-appointed special place in the universe, post surviving Trek's fictional human extinction-level events of World War III and war with the Xindi. Before the imagined utopias of Kirk or Picard and the current xenophobia displayed among our own species, we likely still have some growing to do.

Abstract

We are at a stage in our evolution where we do not yet know if we will ever communicate with intelligent beings that have evolved on other planets, yet we are intelligent and curious enough to wonder about this. We find ourselves wondering about this at the very beginning of a long era in which stellar luminosity warms many planets, and by our best models, continues to provide equally good opportunities for intelligent life to evolve. By simple Bayesian reasoning, if, as we believe, intelligent life forms have the same propensity to evolve later on other planets as we had to evolve on ours, it follows that they will likely not pass through a similar wondering stage in their evolution. This suggests that the future holds some kind of interstellar communication that will serve to inform newly evolved intelligent life forms that they are not alone before they become curious.

Physics arXiv: Odds for an enlightened rather than barren future, David Haussler

Horror Vacui...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 25, 2016 at 6:14am

James O'Brien for Quanta Magazine

Topics: Cosmology, History, Modern Physics, Richard Feynman

Horror vacui: "nature abhors a vacuum." (attributed to Aristotle)

Richard Feynman looked tired when he wandered into my office. It was the end of a long, exhausting day in Santa Barbara, sometime around 1982. Events had included a seminar that was also a performance, lunchtime grilling by eager postdocs, and lively discussions with senior researchers. The life of a celebrated physicist is always intense. But our visitor still wanted to talk physics. We had a couple of hours to fill before dinner.

I described to Feynman what I thought were exciting if speculative new ideas such as fractional spin and anyons. Feynman was unimpressed, saying: “Wilczek, you should work on something real.” (Anyons are real, but that’s a topic for another post.)

Looking to break the awkward silence that followed, I asked Feynman the most disturbing question in physics, then as now: “There’s something else I’ve been thinking a lot about: Why doesn’t empty space weigh anything?”

Feynman, normally as quick and lively as they come, went silent. It was the only time I’ve ever seen him look wistful. Finally he said dreamily, “I once thought I had that one figured out. It was beautiful.” And then, excited, he began an explanation that crescendoed in a near shout: “The reason space doesn’t weigh anything, I thought, is because there’s nothing there!”

Vacuum, in modern usage, is what you get when you remove everything that you can, whether practically or in principle. We say a region of space “realizes vacuum” if it is free of all the different kinds of particles and radiation we know about (including, for this purpose, dark matter — which we know about in a general way, though not in detail). Alternatively, vacuum is the state of minimum energy.

Intergalactic space is a good approximation to a vacuum.

Void, on the other hand, is a theoretical idealization. It means nothingness: space without independent properties, whose only role, we might say, is to keep everything from happening in the same place. Void gives particles addresses, nothing more.

Aristotle famously claimed that “Nature abhors a vacuum,” but I’m pretty sure a more correct translation would be “Nature abhors a void.” Isaac Newton appeared to agree when he wrote:

...that one Body may act upon another at a Distance thro’ a Vacuum, without the Mediation of any thing else, by and through which their Action and Force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an Absurdity, that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.

But in Newton’s masterpiece, the Principia, the players are bodies that exert forces on one another. Space, the stage, is an empty receptacle. It has no life of its own. In Newtonian physics, vacuum is a void.

Quanta Magazine: How Feynman Diagrams Almost Saved Space, Frank Wilczek

Zika and Louisiana...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 24, 2016 at 8:48am

Zika Mosquito - Internet Search

Topics: Biology, Climate Change, Global Warming, Research

I recorded something on my DVR titled "Global Weirding," which I think is far more descriptive of the phenomena. "Warming" tends to imply extreme heat like the Sahara Desert ALL the time. It's more like what you've grown comfortable expecting...don't. Sensational blockbusters like "The Day After Tomorrow" don't help in our impatient point-and-click attention-deficit patience either. Instead of a sudden dystopian disaster, it should be thought of as a slow but steady train wreck.

Aerosol threats have been expected from our changing climate. This new threat is currently growing and concerning for many, like me that have relatives in harms way on the Gulf Coast and Florida. Thankfully, our stalwart, "science-friendly" representatives are on the case, tying battling related birth defects to eliminating abortion. Infants will be safely born on the Gulf Coast (as Latin America grapples with their own previous conservative views and legal prohibitions) sadly, with smaller heads and shortened lifespans. It is an oxymoron; a contradiction in terms and "values."

One of the top U.S. public health officials on Sunday warned that the mosquito-borne Zika virus could extend its reach across the U.S. Gulf Coast after officials last week confirmed it as active in the popular tourist destination of Miami Beach.

The possibility of transmission in Gulf States such as Louisiana and Texas will likely fuel concerns that the virus, which has been shown to cause the severe birth defect known as microcephaly, could spread across the continental United States, even though officials have played down such an outcome.

Concern has mounted since confirmation that Zika has expanded into a second region of the tourist hub of Miami-Dade County in Florida. Miami's Wynwood arts neighborhood last month became the site of the first locally transmitted cases of Zika in the continental United States.

"It would not be surprising we would see additional cases perhaps in other Gulf Coast states," Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the allergy and infectious diseases unit of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), said in an interview on Sunday morning with ABC News.

Scientific American:
Zika Poised for Possible Spread across U.S. Gulf, Chris Prentice

Super-Sized Molecules...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 23, 2016 at 7:22am

APS/Alan Stonebraker
Distant partners. In this sketch, two cesium atoms in high Rydberg states form a weakly bound molecule about 1 micrometer across, comparable to the size of typical bacteria.

Topics: Atomic Physics, Particle Physics, Quantum Computer, Rydberg Atom

Strongly bound diatomic molecules such as H2 or O2 are less than a nanometer across. Surprisingly, scientists have been able to create two-atom molecules more than a thousand times larger by using exotic atoms that attract one another only very weakly. Now, a pair of physicists have calculated what makes these “macrodimers” stable, and they have verified their predictions by creating micrometer-sized molecules containing two cesium atoms. The macrodimers could have applications in quantum computing.

Interest in these macromolecules stems from the challenges they pose to conventional understanding of molecules and bonds. More than a decade ago, physicists predicted that molecules with interatomic distances as large as 1 micrometer might be created by using a pair of atoms in so-called Rydberg states. These are atoms in which a single outer-shell electron has been excited to a high quantum state so that it orbits far away from the nucleus. Although Rydberg atoms are unstable, they can live as long as tens of microseconds, and experimenters have succeeded in creating macrodimers from them, confirming their existence indirectly by destroying them and detecting specific spectroscopic signatures [1].

APS Focus: Giant Molecule Made from Two Atoms, Mark Buchanan

Neutrinos, Matter and Antimatter...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 22, 2016 at 6:22am

Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine
As neutrinos and antineutrinos change flavors they may illuminate the differences between matter and antimatter.

Topics: Atomic Physics, Neutrinos, Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics

(July 28, 2016) - In the same underground observatory in Japan where, 18 years ago, neutrinos were first seen oscillating from one “flavor” to another — a landmark discovery that earned two physicists the 2015 Nobel Prize — a tiny anomaly has begun to surface in the neutrinos’ oscillations that could herald an answer to one of the biggest mysteries in physics: why matter dominates over antimatter in the universe.

The anomaly, detected by the T2K experiment, is not yet pronounced enough to be sure of, but it and the findings of two related experiments “are all pointing in the same direction,” said Hirohisa Tanaka of the University of Toronto, a member of the T2K team who presented the result to a packed audience in London earlier this month.

“A full proof will take more time,” said Werner Rodejohann, a neutrino specialist at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg who was not involved in the experiments, “but my and many others’ feeling is that there is something real here.”

The long-standing puzzle to be solved is why we and everything we see is matter-made. More to the point, why does anything — matter or antimatter — exist at all? The reigning laws of particle physics, known as the Standard Model, treat matter and antimatter nearly equivalently, respecting (with one known exception) so-called charge-parity, or “CP,” symmetry: For every particle decay that produces, say, a negatively charged electron, the mirror-image decay yielding a positively charged antielectron occurs at the same rate. But this cannot be the whole story. If equal amounts of matter and antimatter were produced during the Big Bang, equal amounts should have existed shortly thereafter. And since matter and antimatter annihilate upon contact, such a situation would have led to the wholesale destruction of both, resulting in an empty cosmos.

Quanta Magazine: Neutrinos Hint of Matter-Antimatter Rift, Natalie Wolchover

These Truths...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 19, 2016 at 8:00am

Credit: Chris Gash

Topics: Economy, Education, Politics, STEM

"We hold these truths to be self-evident": the rest is a contentious matter, for at the time the revered words were written, the rest of the sentence "all men were [not] created equal," Native Americans, women and my ancestors chief among them.

"Self-evident": this is attributed to Benjamin Franklin, Founding Father and scientist. It was an edit from Thomas Jefferson's original "sacred and undeniable," a reflection of the scientific revolution at the time, homage to Sir Isaac Newton and "the analytic empiricism of Franklin's close friend David Hume." The American experiment, though far then and now from perfect, would be based not on divine right or dynastic succession, but reason, facts and currently bereft in the public sphere: logic.

It is incredible that Scientific American would take such a stance, but it has to be taken. There are elements of our society that promote "creating their own reality"; the backlash to the Cosmos reboot; Creationism versus Evolutionary Biology; the Flat Earth Society; Young Earth Creationism with more dangerous, unscientific thought on the horizon for exploitation by cynical politicians or the latest flimflam artist.

This year's election is unique as one political party has nominated such a flimflam artist as its candidate, that has made no bones about his hostility to science: "climate change is a plot by the Chinese against American manufacturing." As the New York Daily News opined on his loose 2nd amendment comments: "this isn't funny anymore."

This is an assault on fact versus fantasy, science versus psychobabble; sanity versus insanity. Flimflam's persona non grata interviewed on Alex Jones - the KING of conspiracy provocateurs - as a casual search of YouTube on his rant compilations attests, many right wing pundits have, as he's complained - mainstreamed his views in the public sphere without crediting him, only nourishing a faux ecosystem around Mr. Flimflam. FF sometimes quotes him verbatim, which Jones says admirably is "surreal."

What is surreal is that as a nation, we've crossed the Rubicon. What started as a political tactic to - as Barry Goldwater said "hunt where the ducks are," getting votes from a disgruntled south that couldn't take the changes the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Voting Rights Act (1965) and the Fair Housing Act (1968) ushered in, the Dixiecrat ducks came: John Birch Society cum Southern Strategy cum Reagan Welfare Queens cum Faux News cum Birther Movement cum Alt-Right Movement mainstreamed in an echo chamber. Like a cult, they created their own realities. When Bob Jones University's policy against miscegenation (interracial dating) no longer worked selling themselves as a Christian institution, they found a suitable substitute in abortion opposition. The GOP's platform opposing gay rights - despite the American Psychiatric Association's removing it from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - is evidenced by its insistence on the quackery of "reparative therapy."

What is surreal is our measure and substantiation of information as citizenry, and how we make decisions as a republic respecting reality, facts, data, evidence, REAL THINGS: what truths are self-evident, or quackery we'll follow over a cliff.

"There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone." Rod Serling, Season One Intro.

“If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong.”

—Richard Feynman

Four years ago in these pages, writer Shawn Otto warned our readers of the danger of a growing antiscience current in American politics. “By turning public opinion away from the antiauthoritarian principles of the nation's founders,” Otto wrote, “the new science denialism is creating an existential crisis like few the country has faced before.”

Otto wrote those words in the heat of a presidential election race that now seems quaint by comparison to the one the nation now finds itself in. As if to prove his point, one of the two major party candidates for the highest office in the land has repeatedly and resoundingly demonstrated a disregard, if not outright contempt, for science. Donald Trump also has shown an authoritarian tendency to base policy arguments on questionable assertions of fact and a cult of personality.

Americans have long prided themselves on their ability to see the world for what it is, as opposed to what someone says it is or what most people happen to believe. In one of the most powerful lines in American literature, Huck Finn says: “It warn't so. I tried it.” A respect for evidence is not just a part of the national character. It goes to the heart of the country's particular brand of democratic government. When the founding fathers, including Benjamin Franklin, scientist and inventor, wrote arguably the most important line in the Declaration of Independence—“We hold these truths to be self-evident”—they were asserting the fledgling nation's grounding in the primacy of reason based on evidence.

Scientific American:
Donald Trump’s Lack of Respect for Science Is Alarming, The Editors
#P4TC: Missing In Action...

Eclipse 2017...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 18, 2016 at 9:41am

Image Source: Astronomy Magazine

Topics: Astronomy, Eclipse, Heliophysics

In addition to my youngest son's 24th birthday this Sunday, Astronomy gives a guide to a total eclipse that will be seen clearly in Kentucky next year when he turns 25 (and his insurance rates drop like a STONE). Tomorrow, it's an "almost Eclipse" according to Time and Date. Next year it will be the first total eclipse in 38 years. Since we're in different states, it's quite a coincidence to coincide with his birthday. I hope we both get to see it.

From "25 facts you should know about the August 21, 2017, total solar eclipse" (you can get to it at the link below):

1. This will be the first total solar eclipse in the continental U.S. in 38 years. The last one occurred February 26, 1979. Unfortunately, not many people saw it because it clipped just five states in the Northwest and the weather for the most part was bleak. Before that one, you have to go back to March 7, 1970.

2. A solar eclipse is a lineup of the Sun, the Moon, and Earth. The Moon, directly between the Sun and Earth, casts a shadow on our planet. If you’re in the dark part of that shadow (the umbra), you’ll see a total eclipse. If you’re in the light part (the penumbra), you’ll see a partial eclipse.

3. A solar eclipse happens at New Moon. The Moon has to be between the Sun and Earth for a solar eclipse to occur. The only lunar phase when that happens is New Moon.

Astronomy: Prepare for Totality - August 21, 2017

Self-Healing Tribofilm...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 17, 2016 at 11:15am

Image Source: insideHPC

Topics: Materials Science, Metamaterials, Science, Research

Fans of Superman surely recall how the Man of Steel used immense heat and pressure generated by his bare hands to form a diamond out of a lump of coal.

The tribologists — scientists who study friction, wear, and lubrication — and computational materials scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Argonne National Laboratory will probably never be mistaken for superheroes. However, they recently applied the same principles and discovered a revolutionary diamond-like film of their own that is generated by the heat and pressure of an automotive engine.

The discovery of this ultra-durable, self-lubricating tribofilm — a film that forms between moving surfaces — was first reported yesterday in the journal Nature. It could have profound implications for the efficiency and durability of future engines and other moving metal parts that can be made to develop self-healing, diamond-like carbon (DLC) tribofilms.

"This is a very unique discovery, and one that was a little unexpected," said Ali Erdemir, the Argonne Distinguished Fellow who leads the team. "We have developed many types of diamond-like carbon coatings of our own, but we've never found one that generates itself by breaking down the molecules of the lubricating oil and can actually regenerate the tribofilm as it is worn away."

ANL: Argonne discovery yields self-healing diamond-like carbon, Greg Cunningham

Nanomechanics...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 16, 2016 at 6:41am

Molecular geometry of plastic deformation. Subplot (a): snapshots of the deformation mechanisms, pure CF, for increasing strain. Fibrillar yield is characterized by intermolecular slip (see the circles highlighting a local area of repeated molecular slip). Slip leads to the formation of regions with lower material density. Subplot (b): snapshots of the deformation mechanisms, mineralized collagen fibrils, for increasing strain. Slip initiates at the interface between hydroxyapatite particles and tropocollagen molecules. Slip reduces the density, leading to the formation of nanoscale voids. Courtesy of Nanotechnology

Topics: Biology, Materials Science, Carbon Nanotubes, Nanotechnology

Nanostructures, such as carbon nanotubes, are often added to polymers and composites to enhance their strength. The extreme mechanical properties of carbon nanotubes suggest an obvious rationale behind this approach. However, as Markus Buehler and Isabelle Su at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US highlight in their recent topical review, the behaviour that renders nanomaterials soft or strong can be far from trivial, often involving interactions on a range of scales from macrostructures to nanostructures and – in the case of biostructures – the amino acids and proteins they are built from.

Bone is a classic example of excellent natural material engineering. It primarily consists of tropocollagen fibrils – which would be too soft to support the weight of the skeleton under its daily loads – and hydroxyapatite, a stiff but fragile material prone to fracture. However, the alliance of these two imperfect candidates is an extremely tough, lightweight and robust material.

Based on a simple molecular model of mineralized collagen fibrils, Buehler showed that, as might be expected, the stiffness of mineralized fibrils lies somewhere between the two extremes of the component materials, with as more recent studies reveal, the mineral components bearing up to four times the stress of the collagen fibrils. However, in addition his 2007 study pointed out that the mineralization increases the energy dissipation during deformation. As he explains in his report, “The fibrillar toughening mechanism increases the resistance to fracture by forming large local yield regions around crack-like defects, a mechanism that protects the integrity of the entire structure by allowing for localized failure.”

Nanotechweb:
Nanomechanics – the whole is more than the sum of its parts, Anna Demming

Brittle to Ductile...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 15, 2016 at 6:51am

Plastic fantastic? Quasicrystal deformations and bending observed

Topics: Materials Science, Nanotechnology, Quasicrystal

Caveat emptor: I did notice one comment on the article at the main site referencing "Laplace Pressure" as a source explaining how quasicrystal structures become pliable at the nanoscale. The link (I've provided) is to a Wikipedia page. In blogging, one can play kind of "fast and loose" with reference links if trying to make a point as in an essay, but I wouldn't in general use an open source page with the subtitle "A Free Encyclopedia that everyone can edit" referring to a science article. Out of curiosity, I did look it up on Scholarpedia: "the peer-reviewed open-access encyclopedia, where knowledge is curated by communities of experts." The search term Laplace Pressure came up with four links that did not seem to relate to a nanoscale phenomena.

When shrunk to the nanoscale, quasicrystals become plastic. That is the finding of an international team of researchers, which says that its results could potentially widen the material's applications. Quasicrystals – materials in which the atoms show long-range order but have no finite, periodically repeated unit cell – have fascinated materials scientists ever since their Nobel-prize-winning discovery in 1984. Their practical use, however, has been limited by their brittleness.

Conventional crystals plastically deform through dislocations in their lattice that can allow individual unit cells to swap places relatively easily. This makes some crystals, such as pure metals like copper and gold, highly ductile. In quasicrystals, however, there are no unit cells, so it takes more energy to move dislocations. "Normally, the dislocations in quasicrystals are quite mobile at high temperatures," says materials-scientist Yu Zou of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. "However, below 500 °C, the dislocations are not that mobile, so this can make the quasicrystal very brittle."

Physics World: Brittle quasicrystals become ductile at the nanoscale, Tim Wogan

Prospector 1...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 12, 2016 at 6:30am

An illustration of Prospector-1, a mission that will visit a near Earth asteroid to look for water ice.
Credit: Deep Space Industries

Topics: Asteroids, Economy, Jobs, Space Exploration, Spaceflight, STEM

LOGAN, Utah — Deep Space Industries plans to launch a small satellite by the end of the decade to survey a near Earth asteroid, the next major step in the company's long-term ambitions to mine asteroids for resources.

The company, based in Mountain View, California, announced its Prospector-1 mission Aug. 9. The 50-kilogram satellite is designed to visit an asteroid and look for deposits of water ice that could, in the future, be mined and used as propellant by other spacecraft.

"This is intended to be a very low cost first commercial mission to an asteroid," said Grant Bonin, chief engineer of Deep Space Industries, in a presentation about Prospector-1 Aug. 9 during the 30th Annual Conference on Small Satellites at Utah State University here.

Space.com:
Deep Space Industries Unveils First Asteroid Prospecting Spacecraft, Jeff Foust

Bang or Bounce...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 11, 2016 at 6:30am

Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/J.DePasquale and NASA/JPL-Caltech and NASA/STScI

Topics: Astrophysics, Big Bang, Cosmology, Science Fiction, Theoretical Physics

The next-to-last related topic may seem unrelated: one of the Marvel Comics I recall reading was "Origin of Galactus," nee Galan who in the rebirth of the previous universe became the devouring planet eater that the Fantastic Four would battle and enslave his herald The Silver Surfer. This wouldn't be possible without someone reading the scientific papers of the day, so this idea is not new. It doesn't have to be true, proven or compelling to exist as an effective plot device.

What most non-fans of comics never appreciated is the amount of research the writers did to create their stories. I recall for instance passing a history test on Norse Mythology solely on the info I'd gleaned from Thor comics, albeit the original Norse god was describe as red-haired, needing a power belt and gloves to lift Mjölnir, having a goat-drawn chariot; three wives and children. Probably too much to put on the big screen.

Did the universe start with a bang or a bounce—or something else entirely? The question of our origins is one of the thorniest in physics, with few answers and lots of speculation and strong feelings. The most popular theory by far is inflation, the notion that the cosmos blew up in size in the first few fractions of a second after it was born in a bang. But an underdog idea posits that the birth of this universe was not actually the beginning—that an earlier version of spacetime had existed and contracted toward a “big crunch,” then flipped and started expanding into what we see today. Now a new study suggesting a twist on this “bounce” scenario has supporters excited and inflation proponents newly inflamed over a “rival” they say they have repeatedly disproved, only to have it keep bouncing back.

Inflation has many admirers because the rapid expansion it posits seems to explain numerous features of the universe, such as the fact that it appears relatively flat (as opposed to curved, on large scales) and roughly uniform in all directions (there is roughly the same amount of stuff everywhere, again on large scales). Both conditions result when regions of space that ended up very far away initially started out close together and in contact with one another. Yet the latest versions of the theory seem to suggest—even require—that inflation created not just our universe but an infinite landscape of universes in which every possible type of universe with every possible set of physical laws and characteristics formed somewhere. Some scientists like this implication because it could explain why our particular universe, with its seemingly random yet perfectly calibrated-to-life conditions, exists—if every type of cosmos is out there, it is no wonder that ours is, too. But other physicists find the multiverse idea repulsive, in part because if the theory predicts that every possibility will come to pass, it does not uniquely foretell a universe like the one we have.

“Big bounce” theories also predict a flat and uniform cosmos, thanks to smoothing-out effects on space that can take place during the contraction. But the sticking point of the bounce idea has long been the transition between shrinking and expanding, which seemed to require the much-hated idea of a “singularity”—a time when the universe was a single point of infinite density—seen by many as a mathematically meaningless proposition that indicates a theory has gone off the rails. Now physicists say they have found a way to calculate the bounce without encountering any singularities. “We found we could describe the quantum evolution of the universe exactly,” says study co-author Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario. “We found that the universe passes smoothly through the singularity and out the other side. That was our hope, but we’d never really accomplished this before.” He and Steffen Gielen of Imperial College London published their calculations last month in Physical Review Letters.

Scientific American: Did the Universe Boot Up with a “Big Bounce?” Clara Moskowitz

Science and Human Rights...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 9, 2016 at 8:21am

Image Source: Carlos Fiorentino | Design Education & Research

Topics: Climate Change, Global Warming, Politics, Research

The clearest modern example of Climate Change and forced displacement was illustrated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. I've blogged about my personal experience with it when living in Texas. Irene and Sandy are a part of our recent history and collective fading memories. A notably schizophrenic winter season in the northeast that can swing from harsh bitter cold to mild Indian Summer has not swayed our political leaders in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry. Sadly in the US, what may cause an action may be something more resembling the plot of a dystopian novel; more martial than civil. At that point we'd be trying to hold together what's left of the republic.

Scientific research can inform policies aimed at addressing the needs of communities displaced by climate change, something that is already happening in the United States and around the world, according to experts at a 25-26 July meeting of the AAAS Science and Human Rights Coalition.

Research provides vital tools to identify and shape response plans to mitigate, and, in some cases, prevent, the effects of climate change on impacted communities and the human rights of local people, said participating speakers. Since 2009, the Coalition has brought together scientific and engineering organizations that recognize a role for scientists and engineers in addressing human rights issues.

The focus of the July meeting held at AAAS headquarters was on the human rights implications of climate change, including a session on the role of scientific evidence in addressing the effects of climate change.

Climate change is expected to displace and prompt the resettlement of many communities around the the world, particularly those most vulnerable to sea level rise and weather events spurred by climate change, said Michael Cernea of the International Network on Displacement and Resettlement.

American Association for the Advancement of Science:
Science Can Ease Human Rights Effects of Climate Change, Andrea Korte

Fly Me To The Moon...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on August 8, 2016 at 7:05am

Image Source: Moon Express from link below

Topics: Moon, NASA, Space Exploration, Spaceflight

I'm quite sure this is not what Frank Sinatra ("in other words") was focused on, but its apropos for the post. As excited as I am in a return to the moon, commercialization leads to inevitably waste. If no one "owns" the moon ("in other words"): who is responsible for cleaning it of the eventual human spoilage? When is the moon "polluted" (is it now with remnants of the Apollo missions)? Lastly, will a return to the moon put to rest the conspiracy provocateurs that say we never went, or give their tales a new spin through cognitive dissonance? I think I just answered my last question.

August 4, 2016 – Who owns the Moon? According to the Outer Space Treaty ratified by members of the United Nations in 1967, no one nation or individual. A further agreement in 1979 signed or agreed to by 16 nations governs activities on the Moon including its exploration and use.

Article 4 of that agreement states the “use of the moon shall be the province of all mankind and shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development.”

In Article 11 it further states “the moon and its natural resources are the common heritage of mankind.”

It goes on further to state “neither the surface nor the subsurface of the moon, nor any part thereof or natural resources in place, shall become property of any State, international intergovernmental or non-governmental organization, national organization or non-governmental entity” and that “placement of personnel, space vehicles, equipment, facilities, stations and installations on or below the surface of the moon….shall not create a right of ownership over the surface or subsurface of the moon.”

It should be noted that the United States, Russia and China, the world’s most significant space-faring nations, are not signatories to the 1979 United Nations agreement on the Moon. The only nation of consequence in space that is a signatory is India. The lunar agreement governs all other major celestial bodies with the exception of those that come in contact with our Earth. So meteors and meteorites are fair game wherever they land.

In 2015 the United States government enacted the Commercial Space Act which governs commercial exploitation of space resources. The act gives Americans the right to exploit asteroid and other space resources including the Moon. The justification for the act was expressed by the sponsor of the bill, congressman Kevin McCarthy, who states “this bill will unite law with innovation, allowing the next generation of pioneers to experiment, learn and succeed without being constrained by premature regulatory action.” In other words, outer space is open for business to any American with the means to exploit its potential wealth.

Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead

With the legislation to justify the action in place the American government on the basis of a domestic law is forging ahead and given permission to a U.S. private company to send a robotic lunar lander to the Moon in 2017.

Moon Express, a California company, applied to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration on April 8, 2016 for flight plan approval to go to the Moon and land on it. They have been okayed by the agency to proceed.

21st Century Tech:
Moon Express Cleared for Lunar Mission to Begin Commercial Mining