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Satyendra Nath Bose...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 12, 2012 at 7:52am


WIKIPEDIA: Satyendra Nath Bose FRS[1] (Bengali: সত্যেন্দ্র নাথ বসু Shottendronath Boshū, IPA: [ʃot̪ːend̪ronat̪ʰ boʃu]; 1 January 1894 – 4 February 1974) was an Indian physicist specializing in mathematical physics. He was born in Kolkata, then spelt Calcutta. He is best known for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, providing the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he was awarded India's second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan in 1954 by the Government of India.

 

The class of particles that obey Bose-Einstein statistics, bosons, was named after him by Paul Dirac.

 

A self-taught scholar and a polyglot (mastery of multiple languages), he had a wide range of interests in varied fields including physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, mineralogy, philosophy, arts, literature and music. He served on many research and development committees in independent India.


A "mistake" leading to Bose-Einstein Statistics:

The reason Bose's "mistake" produced accurate results was that since photons are indistinguishable from each other, one cannot treat any two photons having equal energy as being two distinct identifiable photons. By analogy, if in an alternate universe coins were to behave like photons and other bosons, the probability of producing two heads would indeed be one-third (tail-head = head-tail). Bose's "error" is now called Bose–Einstein statistics. This result derived by Bose laid the foundation of quantum statistics, as acknowledged by Einstein and Dirac.

 

Velocity-distribution data of a gas of rubidium atoms, confirming the discovery of a new phase of matter, the Bose–Einstein condensate... Einstein adopted the idea and extended it to atoms. This led to the prediction of the existence of phenomena which became known as Bose-Einstein condensate, a dense collection of bosons (which are particles with integer spin, named after Bose), which was demonstrated to exist by experiment in 1995.

Heroes should be recognized, and acknowledged.Smiley

Wikipedia: Satyendra Nath Bose
University of Colorado: Bose-Einstein Condensate Homepage (links below)
Chem4kids: Bose-Einstein Condensate

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Higgs Primer...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 12, 2012 at 7:48am

Courtesy of Jorge Cham, CERN TV and Minute Physics. Expand each video to full screen view.

Enjoying rereading "The God Particle" by Leon Lederman. Had it since '93.

Sadly, it was in it the Superconducting Supercollider in Waxahatchie, Texas (there is such a place), where Lederman suggested as "the mother of all colliders" where we were supposed to discover the Higgs...oh, well! Smiley

 

 

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The Moment, And Correcting An Omission...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 11, 2012 at 1:20pm
In all fairness: Peter Higgs is a theoretical physicist from England.

 

R&D: Media covering the story gave lots of credit to British physicist Peter Higgs for theorizing the elusive subatomic "God particle," but little was said about Satyendranath Bose, the Indian after whom the boson is named.

 

"He is a forgotten hero," the government lamented in a lengthy statement, noting that Bose was never awarded a Nobel Prize though "at least 10 scientists have been awarded the Nobel" in the same field.

 

The gentleman you see removing his glasses (expressing a lot of emotion for a theoretical physicist), is none other than Peter Higgs himself (~0:51 into the announcement). A primer on the Higgs Boson (the Boson we have Satyendranath Bose to thank for) will post tomorrow...Smiley

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"The Crocodile-Factor" Stories-Enigmas Around an African Tree

Posted by J. PETERSON on July 11, 2012 at 12:09pm

Greetings Friends!!
Please take a look at our Crocoblog and join us there!! We are finishing the final episodes

before publishing our book!!! We would love to have your feedback on our Story!!

This is the saga about the young Shaman KaKo on his journeys to earn his initiation!!!

Feel Free to check it out!!!!!
Thanks So Much~
One Love~

http://www.thecrocodilefactor.blogspot.com/

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Unknown Unknowns...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 10, 2012 at 9:00am

Why are we placing emphasis on standardized testing as our educational panacea, when the countries that are beating us globally use it as an evaluation tool to assist students (only)?

Does "teaching to the test" increase student capabilities and knowledge?
This depends on whether the test is good. For multiple-choice tests, "teaching to the test" means focusing on the content that will be on the test, sometimes even drilling on test items, and using the format of the test as a basis for teaching. Since this kind of teaching to the test leads primarily to improved test-taking skills, increases in test scores do not necessarily mean improvement in real academic performance.

Teaching to the test also narrows the curriculum, forcing teachers and students to concentrate on memorization of isolated facts, instead of developing fundamental and higher order abilities. Washington Post

We've had fires and record heat waves; mild winters; hurricanes in New York and freak snowstorms on Halloween in New England (both resulting in power outages). Parts of the Midwest, Maryland and the eastern seaboard has for the most part been without power after freak violent storms. Yet, we question climate change as a result of a warming globe. More than a few Americans don't know what the decision by the Supreme Court on the Affordable Care Act means to them; that the origination of a mandate (for which derisive humor has been spun ad nauseum), came from former Republican Senator Bob Bennett and championed by Former Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Teaching to the test also narrows the curriculum, forcing teachers and students to concentrate on memorization of isolated facts, instead of developing fundamental and higher order abilities.

Like the higher order ability of governing a democracy. It's a bit of a stretch, linking climate change to education and governance, but not much.

We need reason and legislation that will create jobs, and an educational system that will prepare kids for future careers requiring skillsets to repair robots, not a high school diploma/GED to drill widgets on a production floor. We're fast becoming a nation predicted by James Boggs: automation and (his word) "cybernation" rules.

We need an educated electorate for this country to be successful, not a bewildered herd.

Oligarchy/Plutocracy are false equivalencies to democracy.

"By their votes, the people exercise their sovereignty." Thomas Jefferson

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Fingerprints...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 9, 2012 at 10:30am

The 'other' fireworks 4 July 2012...

Dark-matter filaments, such as the one bridging the galaxy clusters Abell 222 and Abell 223, are predicted to contain more than half of all matter in the Universe.
Jörg Dietrich, University of Michigan/University Observatory Munich

A ‘finger’ of the Universe’s dark-matter skeleton, which ultimately dictates where galaxies form, has been observed for the first time. Researchers have directly detected a slim bridge of dark matter joining two clusters of galaxies, using a technique that could eventually help astrophysicists to understand the structure of the Universe and identify what makes up the mysterious invisible substance known as dark matter.

According to the standard model of cosmology, visible stars and galaxies trace a pattern across the sky known as the cosmic web, which was originally etched out by dark matter — the substance thought to account for almost 80% of the Universe’s matter. Soon after the Big Bang, regions that were slightly denser than others pulled in dark matter, which clumped together and eventually collapsed into flat ‘pancakes’. “Where these pancakes intersect, you get long strands of dark matter, or filaments,” explains Jörg Dietrich, a cosmologist at the University Observatory Munich in Germany. Clusters of galaxies then formed at the nodes of the cosmic web, where these filaments crossed.


Nature: Dark matter’s tendrils revealed

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The Wrangling Begins...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 8, 2012 at 6:39am
Higgs Announcement at CERN

 




We have found it – now we have to work out exactly what "it" is. That neatly sums up the thoughts of many physicists at CERN yesterday as they began to absorb the announcement that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had discovered a Higgs boson – or at least something like a Higgs. CERN's director general Rolf-Dieter Heuer was very careful to describe the new particle, which has a mass of about 125 GeV/c2, as a "fundamental scalar boson". However, even the scalar part of that description – which indicates that the particle has zero spin – has not been completely nailed down.

 


The Scientific Method is a thought process, an accepted means of constantly questions itself in discoveries and published findings. It can be somewhat off-putting to the general public, used to definitive statements and cock-sureness (at least advertised by their political leaders). Although, I don't know if it's the scientists' fault (as Physics Today opines) more than we've become something our brains weren't designed for nor evolution intended: an entertainment culture addicted to instant gratification. What doesn't come easy to understand in seconds is quickly discarded instead of effort made to master. The Matrix was our undoing...

 

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On-Off Presto!...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 7, 2012 at 6:52am

So last month...but neat!Smiley

Credit: Technology Review

Today, Darran Milne and Natalia Korolkova at the University of St Andrews in Scotland outline another idea. These guys have worked out how to make an optical invisibility cloak that you can turn on and off.

What makes this possible is a process known as electromagnetically induced transparency--a phenomenon in which certain materials become transparent when zapped by light from two carefully tuned lasers.

This works for materials with atoms that can exist in three different electronic states--say a, b and, the highest, c. The idea here is that the first laser beam is absorbed by the material because it excites electrons from state a to state c. The second laser is also absorbed because it excites electrons from state b to state c.

If the frequencies of the lasers are close together, they can be tuned in a way that makes them interfere destructively. And when this happens, their ability to excite electrons cancels out.

When this happens, the laser photons suddenly pass through the material unimpeded, sometimes at dramatically reduced at speeds (which is how experiments that stop light are performed).

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Fiction and Science...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 6, 2012 at 6:39am

 

Homer Hickam's Amazon page

 


“Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.”

 


Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

 


“Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.”

 

 


“Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.”

 

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Spray-On Batteries...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 5, 2012 at 7:30pm

...I did not come up with the title.Smiley

Credit: Rice University

Imagine spray painting the side of your house and it not only produces power from the sun, but can store the energy for later as well. A novel approach to battery design from Rice University researchers could enable that and other types of spray-on batteries.

 

The research, published last week in Nature, seeks a new approach to battery fabrication by using materials that can be spray-painted onto various surfaces. Combined with flexible printed circuits and research in spray-on solar cells, the technique offers the prospect of turning common objects into smart devices with computing power and storage. Another possibility is consumer electronics, such as cell phones or cameras, with a battery coating.

 

Technology Review: Spray-On Batteries Could Reshape Energy Storage

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StarBound: The Remi(x) Album, AR Video Game & Comic Book

Posted by Nnedi Okorafor on July 5, 2012 at 3:35pm

Artwork, comic books (that's where I come in, :-D. I wrote the "warning" at the very beginning, too), video games, a system to remix music and more- all African science-fiction themed! Watch the video and let it explain everything far better than I can...since I can't seem to easily embed the video here (I don't have the time or the patience to figure out what the heck the problem is) please click here to view it. 

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All Call For Suggestions

Posted by William Hayashi on July 5, 2012 at 12:31pm

As many of you know, my Darkside Universe of novels, seven total planned, is centered around the premise that black folks have been secretly living on the backside of the moon since before Neil Armstrong set foot there.

What I'm in the process of doing now is writing a story in that universe from the perspective of a black man, living in American, observing the country's response to the "Discovery."

Where I think you all may help is if you wanted to take the time to write a short piece detailing how your "character" would have responded to the discovery.

So, what I'm looking to do is create a story, written by a group of contributors and submit it as a tale written by various personalities here on BSFS.

If nothing else, I would love to hear your opinions and ideas, everything is on the table.

Here's the beginning of the story's intro:

    Scott was born in 1955.  The average house cost $10,950. The cost of a new car was $2,000. Disneyland opens in California.  Ray Kroc began the McDonalds restaurant chain. Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, setting off the American Civil Rights Movement. And, fourteen year-old Emmett Till is murdered in Money, Mississippi for allegedly disrespecting a white woman. It was quite a year.
    He was a middle-aged black man of 46 when the country discovered that African Americans had been living on the moon since a handful of years after his birth, years before Neil Armstrong set foot on the surface.
    He lived through an unpopular war in Southeast Asia that ended in ignominy, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., John’s brother Bobby. Malcolm X, and a host of others, for no better reason than what they said and did angered someone enough to kill.
    He watched as blacks were battered and bruised by fire hose and baton, set upon by vicious dogs, and killed for no other reason than the color of their skin giving license to others for such deadly, and inhumane, treatment.
    And, throughout his entire life, he observed how an entire industry persecuted, distorted and lied about the humanity of an entire race of people because whites needed a foil in their desperate need to cling to sociological, political and financial power over all persons colored. There was no love in his soul for the fictional tellings of a moneyed, corporate media.
    But all that changed when a CIA spy satellite saw unmistakable signs of life on the moon’s surface.  At first the US government tried to hide the fact, but too many people at NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratories, and the Pentagon had seen the real-time download of images from the satellite for them to remain secret for long.  In fact, it wasn’t more than an hour before the country was informed that the satellite had recorded signs of habitation on the moon.
    In a belated effort to forestall panic and further rampant speculation, the President of the United States was forced to make an statement in an effort to calm the citizenry, to try to convey that this new circumstance was one that wasn’t a threat to the nation, and that whatever the challenge, the United States of America would meet it head on, and persevere.
    Right.  How does that old joke go: “Want to make God laugh? Tell him your plans!”
   

Thank you for your consideration.

WmH

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PHOENIX JONES; RACE & BEING A REAL LIFE SUPERHERO ( RLSH ).

Posted by CAP BLACK RLSH on July 4, 2012 at 9:13pm

Phoenix Jones is a young Black man and self-proclaimed crime fighter in a socially progressive city ( Seattle ). He famously has a two-fisted approach to stopping urban crime.

To his credit he’s living proof that all young Black men aren’t what I call “chocolate klanmen” thugging their way through life.

As an older Black man who’s also in what the media calls the ” real life superhero ( RLSH ) ” community I’ve marveled at Jones’ color blind acceptance from the press, liberal and conservative. This argues well for where America is since its most famous costumed crusader is also part of the late Trayvon Martin’s generation.

I’d assume ( thank God ) Phoenix didn’t grow up under Jim Crow-lite like I did. His biography shows challenges in his upbringing which are indicative of our era.

My acute concern as a RLSH while Black is that Phoenix needs to be very, very careful during his interventions. Already arrested once ( case dropped ) local police are not exactly thrilled with his activities. While no racial angle has emerged it’s worth noting nonetheless.

He’s still a Black man using force and detaining White people- even in the liberal Pacific Northwest that’s risky.  The same caveat applies to Black suspects he encounters. One biased cop; upset complainants   plus one biased prosecutor equals life changing potential trouble for this young man.

My analysis might be a little too Old School for Phoenix reality but is offered anyway. As a Southern RLSH activist who began in progress-challenged Savannah, GA., being Black while wearing a mask ( “superhero” or not ) would have created more problems than it would have solved- like being mistaken for a criminal and shot by police! ( LOL ).

Phoenix Jones is the flip side of the Trayvon Martin tragedy: instead of a victim or too often for young brothers; a suspect, Jones is a self-appointed crime fighter or vigilante depending upon opinion. Should scores of other Black men follow his example will society be so accommadating?

Black while wearing a mask Jones isn’t a ” Black “activist vocally focused upon racial issues. He’s no cowled Al Sharpton and thus accepted much more readily. His brand is simple: red-blooded American male decides to do something about crime beyond fuming or dialing 911.

All I’m saying is, ” Be careful brother. ”

People have mostly accepted you for what you say you are but beware those who can’t accept America’s number one “real life superhero” being Black. Look at the grief President Obama gets in some quarters and learn.

My duty as a fellow anti crime activist while Black and male is to pass this unsolicited advice along to Phoenix Jones.

Phoenix Jones; race and being a real life superhero has yet to become a viral debate topic. Perhaps it never will.

But, you never know what direction this stuff can take- esepcially if people begin plotting against you for whatever reason.
NADRA ENZI AKA CAPT BLACK promotes creative crime prevention and homeless outreach. (504) 214-3082

NADRA ENZI AKA CAPT BLACK
ANTI-CRIME ACTIVIST
CHOCOLATE KLANSMEN ALERT! SPEAKER
http://moveonup.ning.com/profiles/blogs/chocolate-klansmen-alert-speaking-tour

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Fireworks!...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 4, 2012 at 1:38pm

BBC: At meeting today in Geneva, CERN scientists announced that the Large Hadron Collider’s two main detectors, ATLAS and CMS, had collected data that are both statistically significant and consistent with properties of the Higgs boson. ATLAS detected a signal at a mass of 126 GeV/c2 (133 times the mass of the proton). The CMS value was slightly lower at 125.3 GeV/c2. Both signals met the 5σ threshold for a detection—that is, they were at least five times stronger than background fluctuations. Although the particle’s mass is about where Peter Higgs and other theorists predicted it would be, more data are needed to determine whether the particle is fully consistent with the so-called standard model of particle physics or whether it partakes of more exotic physics. Exotic or otherwise, the Higgs is not just another particle. According to those theorists, it’s responsible for giving other particles their masses.
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Flee: A Short Story is available for Free Download on Smashwords

Posted by Alicia McCalla on July 3, 2012 at 1:16pm

Flee: A Short Story

Cover for 'Flee: A Short Story'

By ALICIA MCCALLA
Rating: Not yet rated. 
Published: June 29, 2012 
Words: 5780 (approximate)
Language: English
ISBN: 9781476479491

Extended description

Flee: A Short Story is the prequel to the Soul Eaters: An African Elemental Novel. After the death of her grandmother, Shania Moore, a 27-year old African-American woman is tormented by her ex-boyfriend and a paranormal serial killer. When Shania falls into a dream realm and connects with an ancient African Goddess, her earth magic awakens. Shania realizes that in order to save her daughter’s magical soul, she must run into the arms of the white man that she lied to about having an abortion and stood up at the altar ten years before. 

 

Here's the direct link: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/177278 

 

If you'd like to discuss some of the themes in this short story, join the discussion on www.aliciamccalla.com

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What Should Not Be...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 3, 2012 at 8:24am
Credit: Discover Magazine-Bad Astronomy, link follows

It’s generally said that discoveries in science tend to be at the thin hairy edge of what you can do — always at the faintest limits you can see, the furthest reaches, the lowest signals. That can be trivially true because stuff that’s easy to find has already been discovered. But many times, when you’re looking farther and fainter than you ever have, you find things that really are new… and can (maybe!) be a problem for existing models of how the Universe behaves.

 

Astronomers ran across just such thing recently. Hubble observations of a distant galaxy cluster revealed an arc of light above it. That’s actually the distorted image of a more distant galaxy, and it’s a common enough sight near foreground clusters. But the thing is, that galaxy shouldn’t be there.

More at: Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait

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