Reginald L. Goodwin's Posts

Entropy and Meaning...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 26, 2015 at 6:00am

Source: Facebook meme

Topics: Civil Rights, Human Rights, Philosophy, Thermodynamics

"Man - a being in search of meaning." Plato

Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics - The "zeroth law" states that if two systems are at the same time in thermal equilibrium with a third system, they are in thermal equilibrium with each other. [1]

First Law of Thermodynamics - Is the application of the conservation of energy principle to heat and thermodynamic processes: The change in internal energy of a system is equal to the heat added to the system minus the work done by the system. [1]

Second Law of Thermodynamics - In any cyclic process the entropy will either increase or remain the same. Since entropy gives information about the evolution of an isolated system with time, it is said to give us the direction of "time's arrow" . If snapshots of a system at two different times shows one state which is more disordered, then it could be implied that this state came later in time. For an isolated system, the natural course of events takes the system to a more disordered (higher entropy) state. [1]

Third Law of Thermodynamics - Is essentially a statement about the ability to create an absolute temperature scale, for which absolute zero is the point at which the internal energy of a solid is precisely 0.

Various sources show the following three potential formulations of the third law of thermodynamics:

1. It is impossible to reduce any system to absolute zero in a finite series of operations.

2. The entropy of a perfect crystal of an element in its most stable form tends to zero as the temperature approaches absolute zero.

3. As temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant. [2]

Sources:
1. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/heacon.html#heacon
2. http://physics.about.com/od/thermodynamics/a/lawthermo_5.htm

There are admittedly other parts of the 2nd Law I don't focus on purposely: heat transfer and refrigerators. It will become apparent [hopefully] in a moment.

Thermodynamics is the science of "energy and its transformations," usually applied to systems. As I've alluded to in previous posts, the system in question is modern civilization itself. It's just an observation, not a doomsday prophecy. I see common cause-kissing cousins in Al Qaeda, ISIL/ISIS and Dylann Roof, hence the meme from Facebook above.

We tend to fight Entropy in various ways personally: diet, exercise, vitamins. It doesn't keep us from dying, but theoretically it preserves us; prolongs our stay on the planet.

A society can fight Entropy through education, as in the case of what should be called forevermore the Roof massacre, the less-educated tend to be more prejudiced and have less of a nuanced view of the world. It's typically "us versus them," as he stated an hour after his clandestine attendance at a bible study and his rampage began. Would he have been so angry, would he have sought the web sites of racist lunatics had he finished high school? Perhaps learned a trade or finished at least a college degree? His focus on debunked mythologies about African Americans purposely causing - in his twisted logic - genetic annihilation through miscegenation could have been alleviated by education. That would have resulted in stable finances, self-esteem that usually leads to better wardrobe selection, cologne, charm and if fortunate: coitus. He could have relieved his problems; his libido and nine innocent souls would still be with us.

The violence we're seeing in the news is tribal and primitive, born of ignorance and a sense of entitlement that is pathological. Isla Vista in Santa Barbara last year; a torrent of violence on black bodies since Trayvon Martin - shot, choked and beaten; churches set aflame appear to have made a "comeback" - to now a pastor and state senator and his members gunned down in their own house of worship. As these primitive instincts express themselves so violently, we as a nation are approaching Entropy as regressive types struggle in an ever-changing world that frightens them and their perceived loss of meaning, purpose and "specialness" in it. Unfortunately, "times arrow" has no reset button, and nation states not careful nor renewing itself with education of its citizenry, can drift inexorably from order...to chaos. It is at this juncture of our current history, ignorance - in the spirit of Thomas Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" - is NOT nor ever has been: bliss.

Optical Tweezers and Nanojets...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 25, 2015 at 7:36am

Artistic rendering of a lithography by photonic nanojets from an optically trapped microsphere. Courtesy: A A R Neves

Topics: Biology, MEMS, Nanotechnology, Optical Tweezers

Traditional optical tweezers, which have been around for decades, are one of the most important modern-day tools in biology, physics and chemistry. They work by trapping micron-scale objects near the focus of a laser beam. The technique allows objects to be picked up and moved to another place using just light.

Being able to control the position of individual molecules in this way is critical in medical research, for example, when manipulating viruses or large proteins. And being able to accurately place tiny objects, such as carbon nanotubes or nanowires, for instance, in a given structure or array will be important for fabricating nanomachines such as molecular motors and other devices in the future.

Nanojets are relatively new structures and are typically formed under the “shadow” of an illuminated dielectric cylinder or microsphere. The microsphere acts as a focusing lens and the nanojets form thanks to the constructive interference between the incoming and scattered light fields.

The nanojets created by Antonio Alvaro Ranha Neves of the Centro de Ciências Naturais e Humanas at the UFABC are a little more complex since they rely on highly focused incident light beams (in contrast to the plane waves generally used to form such jets). Neves used two collinear and co-propagating beams to create his nanojets and positioned one trap in a particular direction with respect to the other. It is the precise positioning of these two beams in this way that allows the nanojets to be switched on and off at will, he explains When they are switched on, they exert a trapping force on the microsphere, holding it approximately midway between the focuses of both beams.

Nanotechweb: Optical tweezers produce “nanojets”, Belle Dumé

80 Percent Improvement...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 24, 2015 at 5:35pm

The MIT researchers' prototype for a chip measuring 3 millimeters by 3 millimeters. The magnified detail shows the chip's main control circuitry, including the startup electronics; the controller that determines whether to charge the battery, power a device, or both; and the array of switches that control current flow to an external inductor coil. This active area measures just 2.2 millimeters by 1.1 millimeters.

Topics: Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Internet of Things, Semiconductor Technology

The latest buzz in the information technology industry regards "the Internet of things"—the idea that vehicles, appliances, civil-engineering structures, manufacturing equipment, and even livestock would have their own embedded sensors that report information directly to networked servers, aiding with maintenance and the coordination of tasks.

Realizing that vision, however, will require extremely low-power sensors that can run for months without battery changes—or, even better, that can extract energy from the environment to recharge.

Last week, at the Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits, MIT researchers presented a new power converter chip that can harvest more than 80 percent of the energy trickling into it, even at the extremely low power levels characteristic of tiny solar cells. Previous experimental ultralow-power converters had efficiencies of only 40 or 50 percent.

Moreover, the researchers' chip achieves those efficiency improvements while assuming additional responsibilities. Where its predecessors could use a solar cell to either charge a battery or directly power a device, this new chip can do both, and it can power the device directly from the battery.

Phys.org:
Ultralow-power circuit improves efficiency of energy harvesting to more than 80 percent, Larry Hardesty

Charleston...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 23, 2015 at 6:56am

Topics: #BlackLivesMatter, Civil Rights, Charleston, History, Human Rights

I was in Charleston, South Carolina for my oldest son's graduation from Army Basic Training. My wife and I took a horse and buggy tour of Charleston, past the historic Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, its history and high steeple. The memories of being burned down and the parishioners worshiping in secret; Dr. Martin Luther King and Corretta Scott King leading from its steps marches to facilitate the world we currently have - not perfect, but better supposedly than the one we had.

Dylann Storm Roof ended that blithe innocence with the blood of nine innocent members spilled on the floor during...bible study.

The coward did not pick a certified street gang - Bloods, Crips, Gangster Disciples, Latin Kings - and go out in a martyred blase of glory. Surely, he would have started the "race war" in his manifesto; surely he would have spurred others to his cause. They would make room on Mount Rushmore for his gaunt young face. He would be immortal...and dead.

More than one article appears on the subject with its own official hash tag: #TakeItDown. Standard bearers of the GOP like Mitt Romney and state representatives are now calling for its removal from the South Carolina capital, something along with an African American president, I thought I'd never see. Rev. Clementa Pinckney - the pastor and state senator of Mother Emanuel now lies in state...beneath that flag. Mr. Roof was enamored with that, along with the ensigns of Apartheid South Africa and equally repugnant Rhodesia.

The confederate flag has been first above the capital of South Carolina since 1961; made law in 1962, so as long as I've been on the planet. 1961 was the 100th anniversary of the Civil War's beginnings. It's first appearance was in 1954, which Lee Atwater succinctly described in the "Southern Strategy." This has been done with a wink-and-a-nod; covered with platitudes like "tradition"; "heritage"; "way of life"; "Christian values" ignoring the domestic terrorism and outright encouragement of genocide by fire, explosions, gunshot and lynchings...now gunfire in a church. Yet another moment of eulogy over shootings like Newtown that should not happen...that not just children's lives matter, but #BlackLivesMatter. They matter in Chicago and Newtown; they matter in country municipalities and cities...they matter in churches that traditionally, have bible study on Wednesday nights, and I assume synagogues and mosques have similar times of cultural unity either weekly or annually - Ramadan and Yom Kippur comes to mind.

Dylann published a manifesto on the Internet. He gunned down nine innocent American souls. Falsely, it was spread through social media early on Roof was treated to a Burger King meal after his arrest; Freddie Gray in Maryland [definitely] a broken back. Freddie (18) was made by the media to look like a "thug"; Dylann (21), predictably as a confused "kid."

I'll likely tune into or DVR what the president has to say yet again. He looks like he's getting tired of it; I'M getting tired of it. He is one year and four days older than I, yet the gray hair and cracked skin makes him look ninety. As a country, we're an international embarrassment and likely, our lower mortality with respect to the rest of the industrialized world is a self-inflicted wound made by constantly playing...Russian roulette. I am particularly tired of talking about this, yet again. Our "normal" is national psychosis; E pluribus unum to warring tribes.

Dilation and Superposition...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 23, 2015 at 6:52am

Illustration of a molecule in the presence of gravitational time dilation. The molecule is in a quantum superposition of being in several places at the same time, but time dilation destroys this quantum phenomenon. (Courtesy: Igor Pikovski, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

Topics: Modern Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Schrödinger Wave Equation, Superposition

Why do we not see everyday objects in quantum superpositions? The answer to that long-standing question may partly lie with gravity. So says a group of physicists in Austria, which has shown theoretically that a feature of Einstein's general relativity, known as time dilation, can render quantum states classical. The researchers say that even the Earth's puny gravitational field may be strong enough for the effect to be measurable in a laboratory within a few years.

Our daily experience suggests that there exists a fundamental boundary between the quantum and classical worlds. One way that physicists explain the transition between the two, is to say that quantum superposition states simply break down when a system exceeds a certain size or level of complexity – its wavefunction is said to "collapse" and the system becomes "decoherent."

An alternative explanation, in which quantum mechanics holds sway at all scales, posits that interactions with the environment bring different elements of an object's wavefunction out of phase, such that they no longer interfere with one another. Larger objects are subject to this decoherence more quickly than smaller ones because they have more constituent particles and, therefore, more complex wavefunctions.

Physics World: Does time dilation destroy quantum superposition?
Edwin Cartlidge, science writer in Rome

Near Absolute Zero...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 12, 2015 at 6:00am

MIT researchers have successfully cooled a gas of sodium potassium (NaK) molecules to a temperature of 500 nanokelvin. In this artist's illustration, the NaK molecule is represented with frozen spheres of ice merged together: the smaller sphere on the left represents a sodium atom, and the larger sphere on the right is a potassium atom.

Illustration: Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT

Topics: Materials Science, Modern Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Superconductivity

The air around us is a chaotic superhighway of molecules whizzing through space and constantly colliding with each other at speeds of hundreds of miles per hour. Such erratic molecular behavior is normal at ambient temperatures.

But scientists have long suspected that if temperatures were to plunge to near absolute zero, molecules would come to a screeching halt, ceasing their individual chaotic motion and behaving as one collective body. This more orderly molecular behavior would begin to form very strange, exotic states of matter — states that have never been observed in the physical world.

Now experimental physicists at MIT have successfully cooled molecules in a gas of sodium potassium (NaK) to a temperature of 500 nanokelvins — just a hair above absolute zero, and over a million times colder than interstellar space. The researchers found that the ultracold molecules were relatively long-lived and stable, resisting reactive collisions with other molecules. The molecules also exhibited very strong dipole moments — strong imbalances in electric charge within molecules that mediate magnet-like forces between molecules over large distances.

MIT News: MIT team creates ultracold molecules, Jennifer Chu

Note: OOTO for a week or so. Happy Father's Day next week! Back on the 23rd.

MOOC and Sesame Street...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 11, 2015 at 6:22am

Image source: link below

Topics: Economy, Education, Humor, Jobs, Science, STEM

Admittedly, my first education wasn't Sesame Street, it was "Green Eggs and Ham," which got me in considerable trouble when I admitted the "Dick and Jane" reading stories in the first grade were "dumb." (Well...they were.) Despite that fact, half of my first day in the first grade was spent in the principal's office.

I was six going on seven when my parents parked me in front of the television. I was hooked with the life-sized animated characters that would become known as "Muppets." Along with Schoolhouse Rock and the original charter of The Learning Channel, we enjoyed passive learning, a democratized, continuous education that transcends neighborhoods, demographics and social barriers. With a foundation of reading and simple numbers, the strength of Sesame Street was both making education fun and instilling a sense of wonder, the foundation of scientific exploration. For competitiveness in global economies and the narrowing of the wealth gap, we need more of this (and LESS "reality TV").

For 46 years now, "Sesame Street" has created television programming aimed at preparing young children for school both academically and socially.

According to a new study, it worked.

Children who lived in areas where "Sesame Street" was easy to view when it premiered were less likely to have been held back in school by 9th grade than children who lived in areas where reception was spotty or non-existent. Boys, black children, and children living in economically disadvantaged areas saw particularly strong effects.

How this carried over into educational attainment and the job market is unclear, according to the researchers. But, "for a television show that kids watch for an hour a day to have an impact that persists for 10 years or so, that's remarkable," said Phillip B. Levine, a professor of economics at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Mass. He co-authored the paper with Melissa S. Kearney, a professor of economics at the University of Maryland in College Park. (Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, was a Maryland graduate.)

The researchers consider "Sesame Street" to be the first "massive open online course," an education course made available for free to a large group of people. Of course, in the early days of "Sesame Street," people were not receiving the program over the Internet. But the basic tenet of transmitting educational material outside of the traditional classroom remains is the same, the researchers said. Early Childhood Education by MOOC: Lessons from Sesame Street was published Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Education Week:

'Sesame Street' Boosted School Readiness for Young Children, Study Says,
Christina Samuels

Event Horizon Telescope...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 10, 2015 at 6:40am

The Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope sits atop the plateau of Chajnantor in the Chilean Andes, more than 5,100 metres high. To the left of APEX is the central region of the Milky Way, where the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* lurks. Image credit: ESO/Babak Tafreshi (twanight.org)

Topics: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Atomic Clock, Black Holes, Einstein, Radio Telescope, Research

Astronomers building an Earth-size virtual telescope capable of photographing the event horizon of the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way have extended their instrument to the bottom of the Earth — the South Pole — thanks to recent efforts by a team of astronomers with participation of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, Germany.

Last December, an international team of astronomers flew to the Southern Hemisphere: German, Chilean and Korean scientists led by Alan Roy of the MPIfR, traveled to Atacama, Chile, and American scientists led by Dan Marrone of the University of Arizona flew to the South Pole to arrange the telescopes into the largest virtual telescope ever built — the Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT. By combining telescopes across the Earth, the EHT will take the first detailed pictures of black holes.

“The goals of the EHT are to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity, understand how black holes eat and generate relativistic outflows, and to prove the existence of the event horizon, or ‘edge,’ of a black hole,” says Dan Marrone.

Astronomy Now: Planet-sized telescope gives a sharp view into black holes
Research site: Event Horizon Telescope

Human Computation...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 9, 2015 at 8:36pm

Image Source; Tecnology Review

Topics: Collaboration, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Humor, Internet, Research

The romance is the singular genius making some great breakthrough from shear effort and endowment with god-like intelligence that the rest of us mere mortals cannot possibly possess. In academia and industry, there's a lot of collaboration; cross-functional teams; cross-training, etc. Even the most monumental breakthrough that's affecting your life and mine right now - the transistor - was a collaborative effort that earned the Nobel Prize. Humans do a lot of collaboration; it's in our natures and we tend to do it with like-minded people (hence, Internet and other social networks). Sir Isaac Newton - the founder of physics - stated: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants," in a letter to Robert Hooke (Hooke's Law), though it was a metaphor originally attributed to John of Salisbury, meaning benifitting and building on the work of others before you. (Wikipedia)

There is a romanticism I think that originates with the oft-told story of the original "Eureka moment" (a dubious claim, probably more tall-tale than fact), along with Newton's apple and Einstein being, well...Einstein. So much so, my youngest son text messaged his older brother and me a picture of the latest album cover by the rapper Gucci Mane, seen here, knowing full well I'd laugh as he did: "I guess Gucci Mane is calling himself the Einstein of trapology...lol."

As I said, I laughed - literally "out loud"! I just sincerely hope Mr. Mane's lawyers have properly contacted the estate of Professor Einstein and likely Princeton University for the image rights...when you're making money WITH it, that's kinda important!

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: The wisdom of the crowd has become so powerful and so accessible via the Internet that it has become a resource in its own right. Various services now tap into this rich supply of human cognition, such as Wikipedia, Duolingo, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

So important is this resource that scientists have given it a name; they call it human computation. And a rapidly emerging and increasingly important question is how best to exploit it.

Today, we get an answer of sorts thanks to a group of computer scientists, crowdsourcing pioneers, and visionaries who have created a roadmap for research into human computation. The team, led by Pietro Michelucci at the Human Computation Institute, point out that human computation systems have been hugely successful at tackling complex problems from identifying spiral galaxies to organizing disaster relief.

But their potential is even greater still, provided that human cognition can be efficiently harnessed on a global scale. Last year, they met to discuss these issues and have now published the results of their debate.

Physics arXiv: A U.S. Research Roadmap for Human Computation
Pietro Michelucci, Lea Shanley, Janis Dickinson, Haym Hirsh

Computational Imagination...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 8, 2015 at 9:05pm

Image Source: Technology Review

Topics: Computer Science, Image Processing, Politics, STEM

This article grabbed me with excitement and I'll admit, kind of disturbed me as well. The very busy image above in the paper is Figure 13 for reference. I scanned the article for things like "AI"; "Artificial Intelligence" and found nothing, but 48 and 49 in the paper itself does reference two other papers in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, for the true believers in Skynet (it's a nerd joke - really!). However, this could be a milestone in image processing, and with the ubiquitous usage of cell phone videos as witness to malfeasance - police or criminal - this could be very important. The technology for facial recognition could be impacted by this advance, then I got concerned again since civil liberties were up for debate with the recent expiration of the Patriot Act and its replacement by the Freedom Act. With technology we walk a tightrope, thinning inexorably to dental floss.

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: Imagine an oak tree in a field of wheat, silhouetted against a cloudless blue sky on a dreamy sunny afternoon. The chances are that most people reading this sentence can easily picture a bucolic scene in their mind’s eye. This ability to read a description of a scene and then imagine it has always been uniquely human. But this precious skill may no longer be ours alone.

Anyone thinking that these kinds of imaginings are far beyond the ability of today’s computing machines will be surprised by the work of Hiroharu Kato and Tatsuya Harada at the University of Tokyo in Japan.

Today, these guys unveil a machine that can translate a description of an object into an image. In other words, their computer can conjure an image of an external object not otherwise present. That’s a pretty good definition of imagination—in this case of the computational variety.

For sure, these computer imaginings are simple, sometimes confusing and often nonsensical. But the fact they are possible at all represents a significant step forward for computational creativity.

Physics arXiv: Image Reconstruction from Bag-of-Visual-Words
Hiroharu Kato, Tatsuya Harada

A New Dark Ages...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 7, 2015 at 8:04am

Image Source: CBC Radio link below

Topics: Commentary, Climate Change, Democracy, History, Politics, Science, STEM

"History repeats itself, and that's one of the things that's wrong with history."

Clarence Darrow

The post title is very stark, but not a subject I haven't commented on before. My concern is, this one as far as existential humanity, may be our last.

It's hard not to look at Al Qaeda, ISIS/ISIL, The Tea Party, Right-Wing Evangelicals, Quiverfull, The Westboro Baptist Church and not see similarities: they are all primarily authoritarian, and afraid. Like celebrity chimps they are loud, demonstrative, craving and gaining attention; disrespectful of diversity and boundaries and in some extreme cases deadly. They are afraid of the changes in society and a sense of lost control. This is evidenced on social media and our forms of entertainment. Some high profile recent falls from grace - The Duggars as a part of Quiverfull, a recent example - have logged disappointing performances regarding religious orders in the public sphere in the eyes of more skeptical youth, that are fleeing the pews. The fearful thus gravitate to those who seem to have "the answers": simple, comforting and confirming their own hard-ingrained beliefs.

Fear: evidence may or may not agree with ancient texts, followers of which are operating in the realm of faith as well as culture. It can be a positive characteristic that unifies. There is nothing inherently wrong with that.

There is something inherently wrong when the louder primates force their cognitive dissonance on everyone else. Texas pushed through books last year that identify Moses as a Founding Father in defiance of sense and actual history. The problem being other states are now making their textbook purchases essentially based on land mass. CREATIONISM IS NOT SCIENCE, and I will continue saying that not because it's my opinion: it is simply fact. This lunacy is destructive and self-defeating to our survival as a nation. It's a matter of knowing what is real and reality and what is not; what to be concerned about to make rational decisions or not. We cannot make decisions on climate change, alternative energy solutions, infrastructure renewal because it goes against a dogma - a conservative-free market-libertarian ideology. Fun fact: Ayn Rand did not like libertarians. Demonstrably, or should I say not so: not a single circuit design; not a single Nobel laureate; not a single invention or industry innovation that has impacted the lives of millions or billions of people has come out of this faux sacred naval-gazing! I think it would be rude for anyone to interrupt a Imam, Priest or Rabbi to "correct the science" in a sermon based on ancient texts, but no such courtesy is reciprocated to the scientific community. It is the height of incongruity to fear and loathe science and technology, while relying on it for commerce, entertainment and diatribes. It is highly unrealistic to believe a nation at the forefront of technological advances can stay there forever on this path into willed ignorance. Knowledge is democratizing and ubiquitous, and science will be performed here, or somewhere else. The flow of currency and GDP will be clear evidence of this folly. It was the reason for the decline of Rome: we are its modern doppelganger.

"History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."

Karl Marx

"If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience."

George Bernard Shaw

An enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic. Self-government is not possible unless the citizens are educated sufficiently to enable them to exercise oversight. It is therefore imperative that the nation see to it that a suitable education be provided for all its citizens. It should be noted, that when Jefferson speaks of "science," he is often referring to knowledge or learning in general.

Thomas Jefferson on Politics and Government

CBC Radio: Science Under Siege, Paul Kennedy

Hafu..

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 6, 2015 at 9:34am

Ariana Miyamoto - Miss Japan 2015, image source @ link below

Topics: Beauty, Commentary, Civil Rights, Human Dignity, Human Rights

The American enterprise has been emulated since "Exceptionalism" became a neologism in our lexicon. We may have also exported some of our evils.

Perhaps the indigenous population of the Japanese nation don't quite realize they are an amalgamation of several migrating tribes of humanity: Chinese, Korean, Southeast Asian (see link). I'm speculating, I really don't know. Masutatsu Oyama - the founder of Kyokushin Karate - was born Choi Young-Eui in Gimje, South Korea during the Japanese occupation. Wikipedia One of his books - Mastering Karate - traced martial arts to the African continent. We are ALL from the African continent, all aspects and hues of humanity started there as the tropics near the equator was the best incubator for "man-thinking": homo sapiens; tools and opposable thumbs; weapons for defense and offense Going from tree dwellers to hunter-gatherers, we settled in villages with agriculture. City-states emerged, fueled by architecture, writing and trade. Eventually, some of us migrated eastward and northward, probably driven by curiosity, deficit attention spans; greed and power. Over time, our outward appearance due to ultraviolet radiation and Melanin, changed with respect to our environments.

Over time, we thinking men created our own mythologies about our unique tribes. Our deities generally looked like us; our culture and jurisprudence fashioned on not getting struck by their wrath. Slowly, verifiable evidence measured higher than dogma as far as survival. The Scientific Method was born.

Perhaps there are no relatives of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, or at least nowadays in minimal numbers. Perhaps there is no cultural memory of the indignities paid to people like George Takei (Mr. Sulu of Star Trek), when his entire Japanese-American family was interned during World War II for the crime of being Japanese. Or maybe, that's the point here.

Mythologies are self-deluding, and become echo chambers and fill in gaps that actual histories could occupy. One begins to believe the "internal press" about one's culture; one's people...one's exceptionalism.

Ariana Miyamoto is exceptionally beautiful. The fact her parentage is Japanese and African American is irrelevant to that reality. "Hafu" is the Japanese neologism for half-Japanese, similar to light-skinned or Mulatto in the United States. As I said, we've inadvertently exported our sins and dirty laundry.

Beyond tribalism, we should become true cosmopolitans - residents of the Earth and by extension the universe - and part of the tribe called human.

The beauty contest winner making Japan look at itself
Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, BBC News, Tokyo

Cartoon Physics...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 5, 2015 at 6:37am

Image Source: Amazon.com

Topics: Comic Books, Physics Humor, Physics and Pop Culture

Comic books are our modern mythology. We await with baited breath the donnybrook also known as Batman v Superman, though we don't yet know why the "Super Friends" start their inevitable bromance with a grudge match. Avengers: Age of Ultron answered who else was "worthy" enough - Vision - to lift Thor's hammer - forged in the heart of a dying star, which kind of suggests a Brown Dwarf or White Dwarf, meaning nothing in the universe worthy or not should be able to lift a teaspoon of Mjolnir (except apparently, a nail on the wall of Dr. Jane Foster's apartment in "Dark World" - seriously, look again). Technically, Vision came to life from it, so a one-armed curl shouldn't be past his AI abilities. Of course, there are others who lift "the smasher" - including the Hulk, who heretofore couldn't no matter how mad he got!

Currently in vogue on television are series like Agents of Shield (with the exception of enhanced humans and demigods, pretty terrestrial in its physics); Arrow (essentially, Batman with a bow); Gotham (that is so dark, it's a wonder Bruce Wayne or Jim Gordon WANT to stay there); and of course the breakout hit, the societal, self double entrendre: The Flash.

The series ended (spoiler alert) with a lot of cockeyed physics, like running at twice the speed of sound, colliding with a single proton in an accelerator and opening a wormhole so his nemesis - The Reverse Flash (a really pissed-off psychopath that comes back to create The Flash to KILL him - ahem: keep up), so he could go home. Home in this case, the 25th Century, bypassing Kirk and Picard's paltry epochs by two centuries where they apparently have time travel, but no cows for hamburgers, if Rev is to be "believed." The cliffhanger was Barry doing the heroes sacrifice of running into a black hole opening above Central City - that in real world physics would have killed most of the population with its radiation and ground the Earth into hamburger meat, Flash included. Ray Bradbury would be proud of the echo from his "A Sound of Thunder," an apocryphal foundation for time travel stories since its inception.

Of course, it's all hokey fun. Doing a serious and somewhat tongue-in-cheek search on the actual physics of superluminal (i.e. faster than light speed travel) resulted an interesting paper and related article [1, 3]; some humorous posts [2, 4], also tongue-in-cheek funny. Humor is always a good hook for STEM lectures and teenagers.

I enjoy the shows just like anyone else. For any story line to sell its audience, there is the usual suspension of belief in the verisimilitude of the fictional world and its "laws of cartoon physics." Alas, poor Yorick - our laws are binding. Even the Batman - my favorite, since he was for me the most believable - can't escape the laws we're subject to on a daily basis - like all of us mere mortals subject to Entropy, he wears out too. Life without magic is kind of a drag, but there's still much wonder in reality.

For any of these shows, I become that kid on 25th and Cleveland Avenue in Winston-Salem, NC that used to enjoy a nerdy Saturday with my best friend - trading and reading comic books, something sadly I don't think kids do much of anymore. I'm trying not to be the sour physics guy pointing out every impossibility in a movie or TV series - as I've gotten older, I'm better in large groups at keeping my mouth shut.

1. Physics arXiv: How superluminal motion can lead to backward time travel
Robert J. Nemiro and David M. Russelly
2. Geek: Quantum physics just solved one of the great paradoxes of time travel, Graham Templeton
3. Scientific American: Time Travel Simulation Resolves “Grandfather Paradox”, Lee Billings
4. PBS News Hour: Spider-Math and Bat-Physics: Science in a Superhero World, Rebecca Jacobson

Alice's Wonderland...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 4, 2015 at 9:06pm

Image Source: ESA Rosetta Blog

Topics: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Comets, Rosetta, Spectrograph

A close-up of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by NASA's ultraviolet instrument surprised scientists by revealing that electrons close to the comet's surface—not photons from the Sun as had been believed—cause the rapid breakup of water and carbon dioxide molecules spewing from the surface.

Since last August, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft has orbited within a hundred miles of the comet in this historic mission. The spectrograph onboard, named Alice, specializes in the far-ultraviolet wavelength band and was developed by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). Alice examines light the comet is emitting to understand the chemistry of the comet's atmosphere, or coma. A spectrograph is a tool astronomers use to split light into its various colors. Scientists can identify the chemical composition of gases by examining their light spectrum. Alice is the first such far-ultraviolet spectrograph to operate at a comet.

NASA's Alice ultraviolet (UV) spectrograph, seen here during construction, is aboard the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft. Credit: Southwest Research Institute

"The discovery we're reporting is quite unexpected," said Alice instrument Principal Investigator Dr. Alan Stern, an associate vice president in SwRI's Space Science and Engineering Division. "It shows us the value of going to comets to observe them up close, since this discovery simply could not have been made from Earth or Earth's orbit with any existing or planned observatory. And, it is fundamentally transforming our knowledge of comets.

Phys.org: Alice instrument's ultraviolet close-up provides a surprising discovery about comet's atmosphere

Higgs and Mattresses...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 3, 2015 at 6:45am

Skip Sterling for Quanta Magazine

Topics: Higgs Boson, Higgs Field, Large Hadron Collider, LHC, Particle Physics, Theoretical Physics

Three physicists who have been collaborating in the San Francisco Bay Area over the past year have devised a new solution to a mystery that has beleaguered their field for more than 30 years. This profound puzzle, which has driven experiments at increasingly powerful particle colliders and given rise to the controversial multiverse hypothesis, amounts to something a bright fourth-grader might ask: How can a magnet lift a paperclip against the gravitational pull of the entire planet?

Despite its sway over the motion of stars and galaxies, the force of gravity is hundreds of millions of trillions of trillions of times weaker than magnetism and the other microscopic forces of nature. This disparity shows up in physics equations as a similarly absurd difference between the mass of the Higgs boson, a particle discovered in 2012 that controls the masses and forces associated with the other known particles, and the expected mass range of as-yet-undiscovered gravitational states of matter.

In the absence of evidence from Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) supporting any of the theories previously proposed to explain this preposterous mass hierarchy — including the seductively elegant “supersymmetry” — many physicists have come to doubt the very logic of nature’s laws. Increasingly, they worry that our universe might just be a random, rather bizarre permutation among uncountable other possible universes — an effective dead end in the quest for a coherent theory of nature.

Their solution traces the hierarchy between gravity and the other fundamental forces back to the explosive birth of the cosmos, when, their model suggests, two variables that were evolving in tandem suddenly deadlocked. At that instant, a hypothetical particle called the “axion” locked the Higgs boson into its present-day mass, far below the scale of gravity. The axion has appeared in theoretical equations since 1977 and is deemed likely to exist. Yet no one, until now, noticed that axions could be what the trio calls “relaxions,” solving the hierarchy problem by “relaxing” the value of the Higgs mass.

Inspired by a 1984 attempt by Larry Abbott to address a different naturalness problem in physics, they sought to recast the Higgs mass as an evolving parameter, one that could dynamically “relax” to its tiny value during the birth of the cosmos rather than starting out as a fixed, seemingly improbable constant. “Though it took six months of dead ends and really stupid models and very baroque, complicated things, we ended up landing on this very simple picture,” Kaplan said.

In their model, the Higgs mass depends on the numerical value of a hypothetical field that permeates space and time: an axion field. To picture it, “we think of the totality of space as being this 3-D mattress,” Dimopoulos said. The value at each point in the field corresponds to how compressed the mattress springs are there. It has long been recognized that the existence of this mattress — and its vibrations in the form of axions — could solve two deep mysteries: First, the axion field would explain why most interactions between protons and neutrons run both forward and backward, solving what’s known as the “strong CP” problem. And axions could make up dark matter. Solving the hierarchy problem would be a third impressive achievement.

Quanta Magazine: A New Theory to Explain the Higgs Mass, Natalie Wolchover

Cosmic Old Faithful...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 2, 2015 at 10:28pm

This artist's impression illustrates how high-speed jets from a supermassive black hole would look. Credit: ESA/Hubble, L. Casada (ESO)

Topics: Astrophysics, Black Holes, Cosmology, Einstein, General Relativity

Powerful jets of material spewing from the edge of monster black holes may be more likely to arise where two galaxies have merged together, a new study suggests.

Like a cosmic version of Old Faithful (the famous Yellowstone geyser), some black holes at the center of galaxies will spew jets of material into space that stretch for thousands of light-years. You can see an illustration of what these gushing pillars look like in a video of the galaxy crash discovery.

Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, new research suggests these jets are more likely to be found in galaxies that are the product of galaxy mergers.

Scientific American: Galaxy Crashes May Give Birth to Powerful Space Jets, Calla Cofield and SPACE.com

Quantum Spin Liquid...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on June 1, 2015 at 11:08pm

Data taken with synchrotron diffraction indicates a short range, honeycomb-based nanostructure, which is the basis for the anomalous magnetism of Ba3CuSb2O9. NCNR neutron scattering data confirmed this structure and provided evidence for the resulting quantum spin liquid.
Credit: H. Sawa/Nagoya University
View hi-resolution image

Topics: Ferromagnetic, Fluid Mechanics, NIST, Quantum Mechanics, Spin, Superconductivity, Superfluidity

Back from a "blog break." I saw this article last month, but delayed it until the first due to a series of work-related classes (tiring, but very good I might add). I anticipate a few more, as I have that and two family reunions this summer. Not complaining about my people, but as far as my families, they could stagger these...just saying.

Trivia: Today is my wife's birthday; yesterday we went to Shadows Restaurant - her favorite. It's also (to be seen) the expiration of the Patriot Act. CNN and 24-hour cable news was born on this day in 1980. Since I can recall the era of three major network channels, a few UHF stations and television going off at midnight, I don't know if that's a good thing or not. Due to the massive amounts of competition with channels that produce movies on demand, music and reality shows, cable news has trended towards yellow journalism. Happy 35th birthday CNN, for better or worse...

Gaithersburg, Md.—An international team of researchers including scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has found what may be the first known example of a "spin-orbital liquid," a substance in a never-before-seen quantum mechanical state.

The discovery, reported May 4, 2012, in the journal Science, has been sought for years by the physics community. Though the team does not posit immediate applications for the material, its properties relate to the same quantum effects that give rise to superconductivity, in which electricity flows through a material with no resistance, and superfluidity, in which a liquid flows across a surface with no friction.

The term "spin liquid" can be deceptive, as it describes a substance that in many ways fits our conventional understanding of a solid. Indeed, the material the team studied looks like a chunk of earth, but at the molecular level, it is made of copper, oxygen, barium and antimony atoms arranged in a crystalline lattice structure. In this particular structure the copper atoms exhibit unusual properties generally associated with liquids. Specifically, their magnetic orientation remains in a constant state of flux.

When materials with magnetic atoms—like iron—solidify, they generally do so in crystal structures whose atoms have an orderly arrangement of magnetic orientations. (When magnetic atoms interact "ferromagnetically" you get a refrigerator magnet.) Because magnetism stems from a quantum property in the atom's electrons called spin, another way of saying this is that the spins in these atoms' electrons all line up in a single direction. Ferromagnets feature an orderly, static arrangement of electron spins.

NIST Contributes to Discovery of Novel Quantum Spin-Liquid, Chad Boutin

Unexceptionalism...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on May 24, 2015 at 10:00am

Topics: Economy, Education, Exceptionalism, OECD, Politics, United States, Singapore

Exceptionalism: It's not even really a word, it's a mythology we tell ourselves, over and over like a meditative mantra. As with most naval gazing, we tend to believe our own inner press instead of examined facts and data. Self-myth is Linus's security blanket.

It traces back to Tocqueville, even though it's obvious we've retained the old world's sins: classism, racism, the ability and willingness to wage war.

"In recent years scholars from numerous disciplines, as well as politicians and commentators in the popular media, have debated the meaning and usefulness of the concept. Roberts and DeCuirci ask:

"Why has the myth of American exceptionalism, characterized by a belief in America’s highly distinctive features or unusual trajectory based in the abundance of its natural resources, its revolutionary origins and its protestant religious culture that anticipated God’s blessing of the nation—held such tremendous staying power, from its influence in popular culture to its critical role in foreign policy?" Wikipedia

However: of The 10 smartest countries based on math and science, America is exceptionally left out of the top ten...we tie with Italy at twenty-eighth.

What we're exceptional at is pseudoscience like creation science/museums and anti-vaxxers, the inane devotion to the testing industrial complex (making a killing on standardized tests in all 50 states) that Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Finland, Estonia, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Canada (the only one from the North American CONTINENT) have no relevant equivalent in this continued lunacy. As Ken Ham builds an ark and sues to only hire young Earth creationists - legalizing a patently discriminatory hiring practice; Bill Nye the Science Guy is crowd funding a solar sail. Go figure...

Mark Twain once famously remarked: "there are lies, damned lies and statistics," but this is not a lie, damnable or otherwise. Callously, politicians are telling people what they want to hear versus what they need to; making them comfortable to merely hold onto their positions for 20...30+ years and accomplish nothing.

There is still good work being done in high tech in this country. That good work is being done by engineers and scientists that are daily...getting older. They will eventually be pushed out (sadly), or retire. National prosperity is not the result of magical thinking. To continue our leadership and advances in STEM fields, the current workforce will have to have replacements once they can no longer produce at the same level as they did when they were younger; when there was industry, commerce and manufacturing that demanded their brilliance. Our university professors are in the same boat. They can only train students based on demand, and that demand cannot increase when our employment is freely traded across oceans to meet the bottom-line of "bean counters" oblivious to the real world between lattes.

We are exceptionally prone to conspiracy theories: false links to vaccines and autism; every shooting a "false flag" operation; the common nomenclature for military exercises - the exercise code name + YY (e.g. "15") - made into "the boogie man" in Texas by Alex Jones ditto head nincompoops that confuse the strict rules regarding research with disparate links of search engine results after an obvious drunken stupor.

As we advance in technology, there is a fear of it. Everyone has become Al Qaeda, The Tea Party, the Unabomber or ISIS: who all want us all in huts, cabins or caves; women covered head-to-toe, not driving or working, barefoot and pregnant (always) and living in some Shangri-La parallel to the voices loudly booming in their heads.

Hopefully, Robert De Niro's sage yet colorful advice to his co laborers in the arts is not appropos to the rest of the nation. We're sliding down an incline, slowly...inexorably...sliding. Rock bottom will hurt unless we start back up the incline.

I'll be out in a class. My 1,962 post and coincidentally the year of my birth. See you 1 June.

Nanorods and Photovoltaics...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on May 22, 2015 at 11:14am

FIG. 1.
(a) Morphology of the NRs with 5–10 nm Ag nanoparticles. (b) Magnified image of 1(a). One NR with 5–10 nm Ag nanoparticles. (c) SEM image of the reference sample without Ag nanoparticles.
Citation: J. Appl. Phys. 117, 193101 (2015); http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4921424

Topics: (100), Nanoparticle, Nanorod, P-Type Silicon Substrate, Photoluminescence, Photovoltaic, Raman Spectroscopy, Wurzite

Abstract:

The test structures for photovoltaic (PV) applications based on zinc oxide nanorods (NRs) that were grown using a low-temperature hydrothermal method on p-type silicon substrates (100) covered with Ag nanoparticles (NPs) were studied. The NPs of three different diameters, i.e., 5–10 nm, 20-30 nm, and 50–60 nm, were deposited using a sputtering method. The morphology and crystallinity of the structures were confirmed by scanning electron microscopy and Raman spectroscopy. It was found that the nanorods have a hexagonal wurtzite structure. An analysis of the Raman and photoluminescence spectra permitted the identification of the surface modes at 476 cm−1 and 561 cm−1. The presence of these modes is evidence of nanorods oriented along the wurtzite c-axis. The NRs with Ag NPs were covered with a ZnO:Al (AZO) layer that was grown using the low-temperature atomic layer deposition technique. The AZO layer served as a transparent ohmic contact to the ZnO nanorods. The applicability of the AZO layer for this purpose and the influence of the Ag nanoparticles on the effectiveness of light acquisition by such prepared PV cells were checked by reflectance and transmittance measurements of the AZO/glass and AZO/NPs/glass reference structures. Based on these studies, the high-energy transmittance edge was assigned to the ZnO energy gap, although it is blueshifted with respect to the bulk ZnO energy gap because of Al doping. It was also shown that the most optimal PV performance is obtained from a structure containing Ag nanoparticles with a diameter of 20–30 nm. This result is confirmed by the current-voltage measurements performed with 1-sun illumination. The structures show a plasmonic effect within the short wavelength range: the PV response for the structure with Ag nanoparticles is twice that of the structure without the nanoparticles. However, the influence of the Ag nanoparticle diameters on the plasmonic effect is ambiguous.

American Institute of Physics:
Si/ZnO nanorods/Ag/AZO structures as promising photovoltaic plasmonic
E. Placzek-Popko^1,a), K. Gwozdz¹, Z. Gumienny¹, E. Zielony¹, R. Pietruszka², B. S. Witkowski², Ł. Wachnicki², S. Gieraltowska², M. Godlewski^2,3, W. Jacak¹ and Liann-Be Chang⁴

Dark Matter Shine...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on May 21, 2015 at 6:39am

An artist's concept shows a black hole eating material from a nearby star. Researchers say its possible dark matter swirling around a black hole could radiate gamma rays that could be seen by telescopes.
Credit: An artist's concept shows a black hole eating material from a nearby star. Researchers say its possible dark matter swirling around a black hole could radiate gamma rays that could be seen by telescopes.

Topics: Black Holes, Cosmology, Dark Matter, General Relativity

Dark matter circling the drain of a massive black hole could radiate gamma-rays that might be visible from Earth, according to new research.

Dark matter is five times more plentiful in the universe than regular matter, but it does not emit, reflect or absorb light, making it not just dark but entirely transparent. But if dark-matter particles around black holes can produce gamma-rays (high-energy light), such emissions would give scientists a new way to study this mysterious material.

The process responsible for creating the gamma-rays is somewhat counterintuitive, because it seems to defy two common assumptions: that nothing can escape from a black hole and that there's no such thing as a free lunch.

A 3D computer model of what the dark-matter gamma-ray signal might look like around a black hole. Because the particles are orbiting around the black hole (left to right) the signal is only visible on one side.
Credit: Jeremy Schnittman

Space.com: Black Holes Might Make Dark Matter Shine, Calla Cofield