Reginald L. Goodwin's Posts (3016)

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Self-Assembling Quantum Devices...



TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: One of the great goals of applied physics is to make quantum information processing a robust and common technique. To achieve this, physicists will need a simple way of storing and manipulating quantum information, preferably at room temperature.

There is no shortage of possible quantum storage devices but one sits head and shoulders above most others: a nitrogen atom that has replaced a carbon atom in a diamond lattice, an arrangement known as a nitrogen-vacancy centre.

Today, an international team of physicists say they’ve used biological self-assembly techniques to make diamond-based prototypes of the quantum information storage devices of this type. That’s a development that has the potential to profoundly influence the future of computing.

The key to all this is nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond which behave like single atoms. They can store photons, emit them again and interact with other nitrogen-vacancy centres nearby. In fact, their photon storage ability is legendary, holding them, and the information the carry, for periods stretching to milliseconds. At room temperature.

Physics arXiv: Self-assembling hybrid diamond-biological quantum devices

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V'Ger...

Artist conception, Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Not exactly "warp factor one," but its a start...Smiley


PASADENA, Calif -- NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft officially is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. The 36-year-old probe is about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from our sun.

New and unexpected data indicate Voyager 1 has been traveling for about one year through plasma, or ionized gas, present in the space between stars. Voyager is in a transitional region immediately outside the solar bubble, where some effects from our sun are still evident. A report on the analysis of this new data, an effort led by Don Gurnett and the plasma wave science team at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, is published in Thursday's edition of the journal Science.

"Now that we have new, key data, we believe this is mankind's historic leap into interstellar space," said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "The Voyager team needed time to analyze those observations and make sense of them. But we can now answer the question we've all been asking -- 'Are we there yet?' Yes, we are."

NASA: NASA Spacecraft Embarks on Historic Journey Into Interstellar Space
Star Trek Memory Alpha Wiki: V'Ger

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Eye See You...

Kenneth Chau is excited about the newly published research that explains how he and his colleagues developed a negative-index material that can be sprayed onto surfaces and act as a lens.

A team of researchers, including a University of British Columbia engineer have made a breakthrough utilizing spray-on technology that could revolutionize the way optical lenses are made and used.



Kenneth Chau, an assistant professor in the School of Engineering at UBC’s Okanagan campus,worked with principal investigator Henri Lezec and colleagues Ting Xu, Amit Agrawal, and Maxim Abashin at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland on the development of a flat lens. Their work is published in the May 23 issue of the journal Nature.



Nearly all lenses – whether in an eye, a camera, or a microscope – are presently curved, which limits the aperture, or amount of light that enters.



“The idea of a flat lens goes way back to the 1960s when a Russian physicist came up with the theory,” Chau says. “The challenge is that there are no naturally occurring materials to make that type of flat lens. Through trial and error, and years of research, we have come up with a fairly simple recipe for a spray-on material that can act as that flat lens.” (1)
A NIST team has created an ultraviolet (UV) metamaterial formed of alternating nanolayers of silver (green) and titanium dioxide (blue). Credit: Lezec/NIST

For the first time, scientists working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated a new type of lens that bends and focuses ultraviolet (UV) light in such an unusual way that it can create ghostly, 3D images of objects that float in free space. The easy-to-build lens could lead to improved photolithography, nanoscale manipulation and manufacturing, and even high-resolution three-dimensional imaging, as well as a number of as-yet-unimagined applications in a diverse range of fields.



"Conventional lenses only capture two dimensions of a three-dimensional object," says one of the paper's co-authors, NIST's Ting Xu. "Our flat lens is able to project three-dimensional images of three-dimensional objects that correspond one-to-one with the imaged object."



An article published in the journal Nature* explains that the new lens is formed from a flat slab of metamaterial with special characteristics that cause light to flow backward—a counterintuitive situation in which waves and energy travel in opposite directions, creating a negative refractive index. (2)

1. UBC engineer helps pioneer flat spray-on optical lens
2. The Better to See You With: Scientists Build Record-Setting Metamaterial Flat Lens

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The Most Astonishing Fact...

An artist's impression of the James Webb Space Telescope observing the Universe. Credit: Northrop Grumman

The first video embed has the voice of Neil deGrasse Tyson (title credit); the second Nobel laureate John Mather.

The most astonishing fact is not just as Carl Sagan quipped we are made of "star stuff": is that we have within humanity persons threatened by that knowledge; re-fighting the war between the church and Galileo (which, by the way has yet to pardon him...just saying).

The most astonishing fact is we're more comfortable with telling our children of controversies that don't exists; information that could start careers in STEM fields; threatened by critical thinking skills while the rest of the world passes the US by.

NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) will be sensitive enough to pick out the light from the earliest stars and galaxies to form in the Universe, only about 400 million years after the Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago.

It will split infrared light from these objects into a spectrum, helping astronomers to find out their chemical make-up, physical properties, age and distance. NIRSpec will be able to carry out its observations on up to 100 such objects at a time.



Demonstrating its versatility, NIRSpec will also study the early stages of starbirth across our own Milky Way galaxy, and analyse the atmospheric properties of exoplanets orbiting other stars, checking the potential for life to exist there.

The most astonishing fact is that mere excerpt above to the link below (I found out Saturday to some)...is controversy.

SEN: Europe completes second instrument for James Webb Space Telescope

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Confronting Willful Ignorance...

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I'm a live-and-let-live kind of person. I accept others may or may not agree with how I look at life. My viewpoints are shaped by my experiences, observable and measurable experimental evidence and logic.

However, two instances of confrontation occurred Saturday, one in real space and the other on Facebook.

Real space: walking my Labrador retriever. Picking up after her is like shoveling the droppings of a horse! I passed a young couple who in my vision allowed their beagle to plop down excrement and walked past me smiling...

I picked it up and deposited it in the dog waste bins provided by our complex. I saw them on our 2nd lap ("our": got to count Raven!).

Me: Do you live here?

Them: No, we're here visiting my parents (him).

Me: I picked up your dog's droppings. Just to make you aware, that is a policy of the apartment complex.

Them: Oh! We didn't know.

Me: OK. Thanks. [Continued walk...]

Facebook: I rebroadcast a humorous meme with two well-known politicians. One believed the earth was 9,000 years old and that humans and dinosaurs existed together; the other believed the earth 10,000 years old and that God destroyed the dinosaurs for humans. My only comment at the time was an emoticon: (((o_0))).

Someone felt the need to reply: "I believe God created the heavens and the earth and rested on the 7th day."

Me: That's fine, [name omitted]. However, I don't believe the authors of the bible had the information from astronomy, carbon dating nor the scientific method. If so, the bible would need a forklift as the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics in its 94th edition is 2,668 pages: CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.

Him: Good point I still believe the Bible story though the Earth is to (meant: "too" - grammar) complex to come from a big bang theory. The Bible is really not clear as to how old the earth is. So some things we have to take by faith even science does not hold all the answers the more you learn the more you realize how much you don't know.

Me: That is science. Your statement however, was not.

I left the link I embed below. He did not reply. Guess whatever button I pushed he was done.

Live-and-let-live: a position I feel (or, at least I hope) lacks arrogance. The couple that didn't think they would be asked about their responsibility seemed slightly appalled at my stating the facility policy; my theological debate was started by someone whom I wasn't addressing directly, has no knowledge of my life experiences nor asked about what my views in his area of concern were: this person just assumed me hostile.


Live-and-let-live: that means I don't care what you believe or how you choose to live (unless it included ignored dog droppings). The choices - and they are choices - you make in your life are based on your life experiences, which I have no inkling of, nor the conclusions you've made from those experiences and how you interact with the wider world based on them. You and I have a right to them without attack, criticism or judgement as long as we follow stated rules and regulations; standards of civility, courtesy and common decency.

Science is an iterative process of investigation: it often holds strong convictions until evidence clues otherwise, e.g. the  luminiferous aether was once thought to explain the propagation of light - experiment and the miracle year of Einstein - provided correction. It is by no means a perfect process - the scientist and engineers are only human, subject to human frailties, foibles and flaws in their thinking. Thus, a relentless adherence to the Scientific Method is the central arbiter of what is and is not acceptable science, removing one's persuasion from consideration. Science often doesn't know; therefore explores the unknown.

Related link: How Science Really Works

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Appeal From Entropy...

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It is unusual I admit, to appeal from a physics law or personify it as if it could speak.

1st Law of Thermodynamics: Conservation of Energy

2nd Law of Thermodynamics: Entropy, which concerns heat transfer, but more specifically our concept of "time's arrow" and the order of systems.

Over time, things tend to go from order to disorder/chaos. It is entropy whereby we have the concept of time, and like an arrow is unidirectional. An arrow does not leap out of a target into its bow; bullets do not burrow out of targets and reenter their firearms; water does not flow upstream; suns, plants, animals and eventually the universe dies; champagne glasses do not reassemble from the floor to its previous waiter's tray.

Thermodynamics is a study of energy; energy systems and its transformations. It is primacy in how we will manage the increasing demands for power to our cities, economies, schools, public and private facilities. What is true for us, arrows, bullets, water, suns, the universe and champagne glasses should also apply to countries as a "system."

There is a prevailing myth of the "surgical strike." Atmospheric diffraction prevents the usage of laser or particle beam weapons in theater (there have been limited tests), the only surgical instrument that could be called that if it existed in large distribution to units in the field. Missiles deliver payloads; payloads explode; blast waves expand at sonic speeds; shrapnel disperses to unfortunate bodies called "collateral damage." The scatter of a beam weapon from a reflective surface to unprotected eyes or body could be just as lethal as shrapnel.

In an explosion, an internal impulse acts in order to propel the parts of a system (often a single object) into a variety of directions. After the explosion, the individual parts of the system (that is often a collection of fragments from the original object) have momentum. If the vector sum of all individual parts of the system could be added together to determine the total momentum after the explosion, then it should be the same as the total momentum before the explosion. Just like in collisions, total system momentum is conserved. Physics Classroom

It is the above description why in a forensics investigation - say, the Boston Marathon bombing - greater than 90% of the bomb fragments can be recovered on investigation of the blast area.

However, lives and failed states are not as easy to assemble. And like any system that tends to go from order to chaos: the introduction of mayhem doesn't increase stability nor transform it to a better system.

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

 

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"You break it, you own it." Retired General Colin Powell

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What Indeed...


I have a multiple choice question for you.



What’s inside a black hole?



(A) An unlimited amount of stuff.

(B) Nothing at all.

(C) A huge but finite amount of stuff, which is also outside the black hole.

(D) None of the above.



The first three answers all seem absurd, boosting the credibility of (D). Yet … at the “Rapid Response Workshop” on black holes I attended last week at the KITP in Santa Barbara (and which continues this week), most participants were advocating some version of (A), (B), or (C), with varying degrees of conviction.



When physicists get together to talk about black holes, someone is bound to draw a cartoon like this one:


But for nearly 40 years now, we have known that black holes can shed their mass by emitting radiation, and presumably this process continues until the black hole disappears completely. If we choose to, we can maintain the black hole for as long as we please by feeding it new stuff at the same rate that radiation carries energy away. What I mean by option (A) is that the radiation is completely featureless, carrying no information about what kind of stuff fell in. That means we can hide as much information as we please inside a black hole of a given mass.



On the other hand, the beautiful theory of black hole thermodynamics indicates that the entropy of a black hole is determined by its mass. For all other systems we know of besides black holes, the entropy of the system quantifies how much information we can hide in the system. If (A) is the right answer, then black holes would be fundamentally different in this respect, able to hide an unlimited amount of information even though their entropy is finite. Maybe that’s possible, but it would be rather disgusting, a reason to dislike answer (A).



There is another way to argue that (A) is not the right answer, based on what we call AdS/CFT duality. AdS just describes a consistent way to put a black hole in a “bottle,” so we can regard the black hole together with the radiation outside it as a closed system. Now, in gravitation it is crucial to focus on properties of spacetime that do not depend on the observer’s viewpoint; otherwise we can easily get very confused. The best way to be sure we have a solid way of describing things is to pay attention to what happens at the boundary of the spacetime, the walls of the bottle — that’s what CFT refers to. AdS/CFT provides us with tools for describing what happens when a black hole forms and evaporates, phrased entirely in terms of what happens on the walls of the bottle. If we can describe the physics perfectly by sticking to the walls of the bottle, always staying far away from the black hole, there doesn’t seem to be anyplace to hide an unlimited amount of stuff.

Quantum Frontiers: What's inside a black hole?

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D-Dalus...



Last year, the Austrian engineering firm IAT21 set out to construct a flying machine that floated like a hummingbird, traveled as fast as a jet, was as quiet as a hot-air balloon, and was simple enough that a car mechanic could repair it. The company’s working prototype, called D-Dalus, is roughly five feet by three feet square and can lift about 100 pounds. But the size and lift are not what’s most impressive. A flying machine with no airfoil, rotor or jet propulsion can travel where most cannot: in very tight spaces and through terrible weather.





ROTOR ASSEMBLIES

The craft’s four rotors spin at 2,200 rpm, and six blades attached to carbon-fiber disks create directional thrust. The blades act as mini airfoils, their angle of attack constantly shifting in relation to rotation. For vertical lift, a blade’s leading edge rises away from the center of the disk at the top of its rotation and toward the center of the disk at the bottom [pictured], creating a pressure differential.

FRICTIONLESS BEARINGS

Existing bearings were unable to withstand 1,000 Gs of force between the carbon-fiber disks and their blades and still deliver some degree of maneuverability. Engineers at IAT21 developed their own bearings, shaped like metal barrels, that hold up to the force better than spheres (think: arches) but can still roll enough for the blades to move.

In Greek mythology, Daedalus /di:dəlɪs/ or /dɛdəlɪs/ (Ancient Greek: Δαίδαλος, meaning "clever worker"; Latin: Daedalos; Etruscan: Taitale) was a skillful craftsman and artisan.[1][2] He is the father of Icarus and Iapyx and the uncle of Perdix.





Daedalus is first mentioned by Homer as the creator of a wide dancing-ground for Ariadne.[12] He also created the Labyrinth on Crete, in which the Minotaur (part man, part bull) was kept. In the story of the labyrinth Hellenes told, the Athenian hero Theseus is challenged to kill the Minotaur, finding his way with the help of Ariadne's thread. Daedalus' appearance in Homer is in an extended simile, "plainly not Homer's invention," Robin Lane Fox observes: "he is a point of comparison and so he belongs in stories which Homer's audience already recognized."[13] In Bronze Age Crete, an inscription da-da-re-jo-de has been read as referring to a place at Knossos,[14] and a place of worship.[15]

In Homer's language, objects which are daidala are finely crafted. They are mostly objects of armour, but fine bowls and furnishings are daidala, and on one occasion so are the "bronze-working" of "clasps, twisted brooches, earrings and necklaces" made by Hephaestus while cared for in secret by the goddesses of the sea.[16] Wikipedia

Popular Science: How D-Dalus Flies Like Nothing Else

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Phobos Eclipse...



Images taken with a telephoto-lens camera on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity catch the larger of Mars' two moons, Phobos, passing directly in front of the sun -- the sharpest images of a solar eclipse ever taken at Mars.

The images are the first full-resolution frames downlinked to Earth from an Aug. 17, 2013, series. The series may later provide a movie of the eclipse. Curiosity paused during its drive that day to record the sky-watching images.



"This event occurred near noon at Curiosity's location, which put Phobos at its closest point to the rover, appearing larger against the sun than it would at other times of day," said Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University, College Station, a co-investigator for use of Curiosity's Mastcam. "This is the closest to a total eclipse of the sun that you can have from Mars."

DEIMOS (or Deimus) was the god (daimon) of fear, dread and terror, and his twin-brother PHOBOS (Phobus) of panic fear, flight and battlefield rout. reference

Mars has two known moons, Phobos and Deimos,[1] which are thought to be captured asteroids.[2] Both satellites were discovered in 1877 by Asaph Hall[3] and are named after the characters Phobos (panic/fear) and Deimos (terror/dread) who, in Greek mythology, accompanied their father Ares, god of war, into battle. Ares was known as Mars to the Romans. It is possible that Mars may have moons smaller than 50 – 100 meters and a dust ring between Phobos and Deimos may be present but none have been discovered.[4] Wikipedia

Science Daily: NASA Mars rover views eclipse of the sun by Phobos

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Emancipation...

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I passed through Barnes and Noble yesterday, and happened on "The Nazi Occult War" by Michael Fitzgerald. The Vril Society; the New Teutonic Knights; Black Camelot; the Nazi Occult Bureau; Atlantis and Aryan science: then on the book's back cover (or, at least this version of it - meant to "hook" you into buying it), something stuck out that startled me - the Nazis spent more on finding Atlantis than we did on the Manhattan Project. It would seem that part of the Marvel "Captain America" movie and their search for the Tesseract appears to have been based on this borrowed historical fact.

Think about that a moment...

I had my misgivings more than anyone, raised on inane "duck and cover" drills that wouldn't even literally CYA...part of the Nazi's undoing was an adherence to what could not be observed, experimented on or proven; a mental divorce from the facts as they were; hence they were victims of "magical thinking" on steroids, supported by an ideology reinforced by their governing structure.

Fast-forward to the bio of current German Prime Minister Angela Merkel:

At school, she learned to speak Russian fluently, and was awarded prizes for her proficiency in Russian and Mathematics.[15] Merkel was educated in Templin and at the University of Leipzig, where she studied physics from 1973 to 1978. While a student, she participated in the reconstruction of the ruin of the Moritzbastei, a project students initiated to create their own club and recreation facility on campus. Such an initiative was unprecedented in the GDR of that period, and initially resisted by the University of Leipzig. However, with backing of the local leadership of the SED party, the project was allowed to proceed.[16] Merkel worked and studied at the Central Institute for Physical Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin-Adlershof from 1978 to 1990. After being awarded a doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) for her thesis on quantum chemistry,[17] she worked as a researcher and published several papers. Wikipedia

MSNBC has promoted a hash tag and site: #AdvancingTheDream. My commentary on how I was working to advance the dream was very simple and straight-forward: STEM education = emancipation.

China's top leadership seem to possess science backgrounds, in contrast: we have 9 out of 538 in the House of Representatives and the Senate with STEM backgrounds.


Dr. King was refreshingly a Trekkie (Trekker is the modern phrase; Roddenberry corrects). Unlike his theological contemporaries today, science didn't appear to threaten him or his personal beliefs; he found common cause with persons inside and outside of his culture and faith patterns.

STEM education = emancipation, and godspeed lucidity.

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Photonic Quantum Systems...



Summary:


Optical frequency conversion, in which the color of light is changed, is a process that has numerous applications in physics and technology. For example, green laser pointers typically involve second harmonic generation, where a strong beam produced by a laser at 1064 nm is frequency doubled in a nonlinear crystal to produce a visible beam at 532 nm. From the perspective of quantum and classical information processing, the ability to manipulate the color of light, and in particular, quantum states of light, can be an extremely important resource. First, it can be used to connect quantum systems operating in different frequency regions.


Frequency conversion, if accomplished in a manner that preserves all other quantum properties of light, can enable interfacing between these different components of future quantum information processing systems. Such quantum frequency conversion may also be particularly relevant for solid-state quantum optical systems, such as those based on semiconductor quantum dots. This is because such systems invariably suffer from “inhomogeneous broadening”, in which small variations in geometry and/or composition cause the quantum dots to emit at slightly different wavelengths, which can be limiting in applications where identical photons are required.

NIST: Frequency Conversion Interfaces for Photonic Quantum Systems

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Zombie Uppers...


Lurking at the fringes of the periodic table, superheavy element 115 has been a favoured material in UFO conspiracy theories and video games. Now we may have evidence that it actually exists.

A group led by Dirk Rudolph of Lund University in Sweden reports the creation of 30 atoms of element 115, informally called ununpentium. Their sightings back up previous reports from a group in Russia, although the results must be reviewed by an international chemistry committee before they are deemed official.

Superheavy elements are more than scientific curiosities. Seeking them allows us to probe the boundaries of matter and possibly find the "island of stability", a group of heavy elements that scientists predict will be stable for decades – if they could only be produced. If confirmed, the recent sighting would include the first observations of X-ray and gamma ray emissions from the decay of element 115, which could illuminate theories about the structure of superheavy nuclei in general.

I know a poet in Austin that uses the stage name: "Element 615," which would make for a HUGE Periodic Table, let alone you'd be doing the electron configuration for a bunch of Sundays! But my friend is deep/heavy, thus STEM has impacted the arts.

BTW: ununpentium's configuration is:  [Rn] 5f14 6d10 7s2 7p3, and that's shorthand of a substantial nightmare if you had to memorize it for an exam, and scarier than any flesh eating, limping zombie.

There will be a naming contest, and conspiracy theorists that will assign this to the coming apocalypse of the undead (which is funny, because apocalypse from Greek means "reveal," not disaster).

Anyway, TRMS had to me, the funniest presentation in its "Moment of Geek" that in a break from Solid State Device homework made me laugh out loud!

Happy Friday!

New Scientist: Fresh evidence emerges for superheavy element 115


Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
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The Matrix...

Nature

Imagine waking up one day and realizing that you actually live inside a computer game,” says Mark Van Raamsdonk, describing what sounds like a pitch for a science-fiction film. But for Van Raamsdonk, a physicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, this scenario is a way to think about reality. If it is true, he says, “everything around us — the whole three-dimensional physical world — is an illusion born from information encoded elsewhere, on a two-dimensional chip”. That would make our Universe, with its three spatial dimensions, a kind of hologram, projected from a substrate that exists only in lower dimensions.



This 'holographic principle' is strange even by the usual standards of theoretical physics. But Van Raamsdonk is one of a small band of researchers who think that the usual ideas are not yet strange enough. If nothing else, they say, neither of the two great pillars of modern physics — general relativity, which describes gravity as a curvature of space and time, and quantum mechanics, which governs the atomic realm — gives any account for the existence of space and time. Neither does string theory, which describes elementary threads of energy.

One of the most obvious questions to ask is whether this endeavour is a fool's errand. Where is the evidence that there actually is anything more fundamental than space and time?

A provocative hint comes from a series of startling discoveries made in the early 1970s, when it became clear that quantum mechanics and gravity were intimately intertwined with thermodynamics, the science of heat.

Even if it is correct, the thermodynamic approach says nothing about what the fundamental constituents of space and time might be. If space-time is a fabric, so to speak, then what are its threads?

One possible answer is quite literal. The theory of loop quantum gravity, which has been under development since the mid-1980s by Ashtekar and others, describes the fabric of space-time as an evolving spider's web of strands that carry information about the quantized areas and volumes of the regions they pass through6. The individual strands of the web must eventually join their ends to form loops — hence the theory's name — but have nothing to do with the much better-known strings of string theory. The latter move around in space-time, whereas strands actually are space-time: the information they carry defines the shape of the space-time fabric in their vicinity.

Nature: Theoretical physics: The origins of space and time

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Luddites Lament...

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One of the primary reason that stands out for the transistor was driven by NASA and the need to reduce cargo space and increase computing power for orbital and missions to the moon - before that, slide rules. I know I just tweaked the die hard "conspiracy theorists" out there that don't believe we went to the moon, yet ardently believe Area 51 has aliens instead of high tech devoted to aerospace (see: "Zero Dark Thirty" - they mentioned it) and the pyramids couldn't have been built by the same North African Egyptian architects the Romans thought enough of to "import" to the empire and build most of their modern architecture and technology: aqueducts, arches, obelisks (think Washington Monument); plumbing.

The conspiracy theorists, I feel, cling to their extravagant notions because: 1. They want to be the first to say "ah-ha! Told you so!" 2. They are making up for inadequacies in other life areas, like actually earning a degree. 3. It's a way not to face reality and put their gray matter to real world problems for which many of us...don't have easy answers.

The original Luddites protested the advent of labor saving textile machines; riots broke out. Ultimately of course, capitalism with the assist of the English government won. I submit the Luddites should have fought hard not to break spindles, but for an equitable system of education and retraining, as we should here.

Technology replaces the need for middle-level workers; confounds the romanticism of "working yourself up by your own bootstraps"; places stipulations on positions in the "minimum requirements" narrative description; encourages students to pursue at least a college degree. A robot can replace many workers that used to drill a widget: become the one who repairs the robot! We're in a dark balance of a moribund way to measure unemployment, as in you are unemployed if receiving a paycheck from the government; never a measure of an under-employment index, i.e. you're making less that you used to (found myself in that dilemma for a few years). To a certain extent, that's reflected in consumer confidence and purchasing patterns. Because of that previous wilderness experience, I am studying as my info to the right (see under E = MC2) suggests; and due to lack of time or interest in fantasy, I don't engage much in conspiracy theories (they're not graded, not part of any interview process I'm aware of). Case in point: Texas Senator Ted Cruz actually being born in another country (Canada is: requires a passport to go to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls). He is a natural-born US citizen due to his mother's citizenship: if the current president had been born in Kenya (he was not); this logic would also apply to him. Karma always repays with irony.

Greed is keeping minimum wage minimum (thank God Australia ignores our stellar inane example): some in the canopy of the economy would like to eliminate it entirely. That has the logic of a rain forest burning its own tree trunks to preserve leaves.

Our education system hasn't much modernized from its Prussian model that prepared factory workers: it's no accident a factory is called a "campus"; you're encouraged to take career specific classes and be life-long learners; you have a defined lunch break/hour; bells trained us in school like Pavlov's dogs, herding us to and fro. We're renaming and reclaiming the same insane testing regimen that no other country ahead of us in STEM graduates and careers follow. Initially, academies in the US were set up strictly along the color line vis-a-vis de jure segregation. I see no difference in its de facto modern incarnation. Some wishing for a utopia that never was has the same impact as "Waiting for Godot."

At one end are so-called abstract tasks that require problem-solving, intuition, persuasion and creativity. These tasks are characteristic of professional, managerial, technical and creative occupations, like law, medicine, science, engineering, advertising and design. People in these jobs typically have high levels of education and analytical capability, and they benefit from computers that facilitate the transmission, organization and processing of information.

On the other end are so-called manual tasks, which require situational adaptability, visual and language recognition, and in-person interaction. Preparing a meal, driving a truck through city traffic or cleaning a hotel room present mind-bogglingly complex challenges for computers. But they are straightforward for humans, requiring primarily innate abilities like dexterity, sightedness and language recognition, as well as modest training. These workers can’t be replaced by robots, but their skills are not scarce, so they usually make low wages.

Computerization has therefore fostered a polarization of employment, with job growth concentrated in both the highest- and lowest-paid occupations, while jobs in the middle have declined. Surprisingly, overall employment rates have largely been unaffected in states and cities undergoing this rapid polarization. Rather, as employment in routine jobs has ebbed, employment has risen both in high-wage managerial, professional and technical occupations and in low-wage, in-person service occupations. (1)

This is a real-world problem, and testing regimens are not going to raise us out of it; fitting children through some predetermined model is not going to advance us; teaching made-up controversies about the origin of the universe, aliens, cabals and evolution aren't going to make us smarter: we'll just become more of a caricature as we fall further and further behind.

Sadly, this is not a new concept introduced in the NY Times (2); as Ecclesiastes said: "there are no new things under the sun."

So set your sights on the immediacy of now, o theorists!
Solve the Bermuda Triangle and Bigfoot later...

1. NY Times: How Technology Wrecks the Middle Class
2. James Boggs: The American Revolution - Pages From a Negro Worker's Notebook

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Zeno Diamonds...


ABSTRACT: The quantum Zeno effect, i.e. the inhibition of coherent quantum dynamics by measurement operations is one of the most intriguing predictions of quantum mechanics. Here we experimentally demonstrate the quantum Zeno effect by inhibiting the microwave driven coherent spin dynamics between two ground state spin levels of a single nitrogen vacancy center in diamond. Our experiments are supported by a detailed analysis of the population dynamics via a semi-classical model.


"The quantum Zeno effect is a situation in which an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay," from Zeno's arrow paradox: "If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless." (WIKIPEDIA)
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BitCoins and Blank Checks...



Based upon the mood and tenor of the 50th anniversary reenactment of the March on Washington, this simulation by Econo Physicists seems not to shed light on much hope of things getting more equitable.

Slouching towards dystopia...


From Technology Review


The Matthew effect





In January 2009, a small group of Internet enthusiasts began an unusual economic experiment when they began to trade a new type of digital cash known as BitCoin. After a shaky start, the idea caught on and grew rapidly after 2011.

Today, bitcoins can buy a wider range of goods and services. In total, the BitCoin marketplace has hosted over 17 million transactions and the value of all the bitcoins in circulation is over $1 billion.

One interesting aspect of this marketplace is that the complete list of all transactions is publicly available. And this gave Daniel Kondor and buddies at Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary an idea.

Kondor and co say that the evolution clearly occurred in two separate phases. Before 2011, the system was used only by a few enthusiasts and the bitcoins had no real-world value. During this time, there was little activity and the various measures of network structure varied hugely.

In 2011, however, BitCoin began to get significant media coverage which attracted many more users. The currency also became more attractive after an exchange was set up that allowed bitcoins to be traded for dollars. During this second phase, bitcoins started to function as a real currency.

The team’s key finding from this second phase is related to wealth accumulation. Kondor and co say that the network grew by preferential attachment. In other words, a node with a large number of links is likely to attract more links than a node with only a few links.

This is a well-known effect in network science. Economists call it the Matthew effect after the biblical observation that the rich get richer.

"And He has made from ONE blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their pre-appointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings," Acts 17:26
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Last Battlefield...


Today on the calendar is not the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington: that will occur 28 August, next Wednesday.

There will be a reinactment commemoration tomorrow. I was one years old and a few days at the time. Soldiers like my sister and Representative John Lewis were in the fight: arrested, beaten, bitten, [smoke] blown in faces, cursed, hosed, jailed, spat on - drilled ad nauseum on passive psychological resistance techniques that would have made SERE trainees cringe.

50 years later: Jackie Robinson's statue is desecrated like he never played the game or changed the world; Representative Stockman wants a repeat performance of the Missouri rodeo clown in Texas (ironic he represents the 36th district where James Byrd died in Jasper); section 4 of the Voting Rights Act gone and draconian ID laws/21st Century Poll Tax in effect and "Moral Mondays" in my home state. I'm not sure if it will be a commemoration, or a wake. We shall see.

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

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

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

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

Source: Wikipedia

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

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

Amazon link


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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., BrainyQuote.com

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