Back in Business

Physicists returned to their future on Friday. About 10 p.m. last night outside Geneva, scientists at CERN succeeded in sending beams of protons clockwise around the 17-mile underground magnetic racetrack known as the Large Hadron Collider.

In pictures: Cern Large Hadron Collider restarts – BBC News

Placebo Effect on the Rise

“Last November, a new type of gene therapy for Parkinson’s disease, championed by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, was abruptly withdrawn from Phase II trials after unexpectedly tanking against placebo. A stem-cell startup called Osiris Therapeutics got a drubbing on Wall Street in March, when it suspended trials of its pill for Crohn’s disease, an intestinal ailment, citing an “unusually high” response to placebo. Two days later, Eli Lilly broke off testing of a much-touted new drug for schizophrenia when volunteers showed double the expected level of placebo response.

It’s not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late ’90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time. It’s not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It’s as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.”

Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why. – Wired

The New Odd Couple? Point Particles and Gravity

Have quantum particles and gravity been reconciled?
Whatever will we do with all that string we’ve been collecting?

“… Matter is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, but so far, Einstein’s theory has resisted all attempts to reconcile it with quantum mechanics. Our understanding of subatomic phenomena is encoded in the standard model of elementary particle physics (based on an extension of quantum electrodynamics called Yang-Mills theory) which, for all we know, correctly describes the interactions of known matter within relativistic quantum field theory. This is an elaborate mathematical framework, which took many decades to develop and still presents many difficulties. These are due in particular to the necessity of having to deal with infinite expressions appearing at intermediate stages of every calculation, and their removal by a procedure referred to as renormalization. Infinities generally arise because of the pointlike nature of elementary particles, implying short distance singularities in the formulas (or “ultraviolet infinities” in momentum space). To this day we are not sure whether quantum field theory makes sense as a mathematical theory, but we do know that it works exceedingly well in perturbation theory, yielding spectacular agreement between theory and experiment. However, applying the established rules of quantum field theory to Einstein gravity and its generalizations results in complete failure—with one possible exception: As Zvi Bern, John Carrasco, and Henrik Johanssen at UCLA, Lance Dixon at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and Radu Roiban at Pennsylvania State University, all in the US, report in Physical Review Letters, N=8 supergravity, distinguished among all other field theories by its maximal supersymmetry, may evade this dilemma…”

Vanquishing Infinity: Ultraviolet Behavior of N=8 Supergravity at Four Loops – APS Viewpoint

Hungry Holes

The first black holes in the universe were born starving.

A new study found that the earliest black holes lacked nearby matter to gobble up, and so lay relatively stagnant in pockets of emptiness.

The finding, based on the most detailed computer simulations to date, counters earlier ideas that these first black holes accumulated mass quickly and ballooned into the supermassive black holes that lurk at the centers of many galaxies today.

“It has been speculated that these first black holes were seeds and accreted huge amounts of matter,” said the study’s leader Marcelo Alvarez, an astrophysicist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology in California. “We’re just finding out that it could be much more complex than that.”

First Black Holes Starved at Birth – Space.com

When Size Matters

“Stars in a distant galaxy move at stunning speeds — greater than 1 million mph, astronomers have revealed.

These hyperactive stars move at about twice the speed of our sun through the Milky Way, because their host galaxy is very massive, yet strangely compact. The scene, which has theorists baffled, is 11 billion light-years away. It is the first time motions of individual stars have been measured in a galaxy so distant.

While the stars’ swiftness is notable, stars in other galaxies have been observed to travel at similarly high speeds. In those situations, it was usually because they were interlopers from outside, or circling close to a black hole.

But in this case, the stars’ high velocities help astronomers confirm that the galaxy they belong to really is as massive as earlier data suggested.”

Speeding Stars Confirm Bizarre Nature of Faraway Galaxies – Space.com

Quantum Entanglement, Coherence and Birds

“Scientists are coming ever closer to understanding the cellular navigation tools that guide birds in their unerring, globe-spanning migrations.

The latest piece of the puzzle is superoxide, an oxygen molecule that may combine with light-sensitive proteins to form an in-eye compass, allowing birds to see Earth’s magnetic field.

“It connects from the subatomic world to a whole bird flying,” said Michael Edidin, an editor of Biphysical Journal, which published the study last week. “That’s exciting!”

The superoxide theory is proposed by Biophysicist Klaus Schulten of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, lead author of the study and a pioneer in avian magnetoreception. Schulten first hypothesized in 1978 that some sort of biochemical reaction took place in birds’ eyes, most likely producing electrons whose spin was affected by subtle magnetic gradients.

In 2000, Schulten refined this model, suggesting that the compass contained a photoreceptor protein called cryptochrome, which reacted with an as-yet-unidentified molecule to produce pairs of electrons that existed in a state of quantum entanglement — spatially separated, but each still able to affect the other…”

Reverse-Engineering the Quantum Compass of Birds – Wired Science

Many thanks to my friend Iain for bringing this article to my attention.

The Physics of Starbucks Coffee

So there’s glass everywhere at a Starbucks on Hawthorne and Artesia after last night’s earthquake in Los Angeles… and yet the coffees on the table apparently didn’t budge an inch.

Er, what’s *in* that stuff?!?

A Quantum Threat

A great article examining the current evidence which gives rise to debates about wave function, among other insights… Enjoy!

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“Our intuition, going back forever, is that to move, say, a rock, one has to touch that rock, or touch a stick that touches the rock, or give an order that travels via vibrations through the air to the ear of a man with a stick that can then push the rock—or some such sequence. This intuition, more generally, is that things can only directly affect other things that are right next to them. If A affects B without being right next to it, then the effect in question must be indirect—the effect in question must be something that gets transmitted by means of a chain of events in which each event brings about the next one directly, in a manner that smoothly spans the distance from A to B. Every time we think we can come up with an exception to this intuition—say, flipping a switch that turns on city street lights (but then we realize that this happens through wires) or listening to a BBC radio broadcast (but then we realize that radio waves propagate through the air)—it turns out that we have not, in fact, thought of an exception. Not, that is, in our everyday experience of the world.

We term this intuition ‘locality.’

Quantum mechanics has upended many an intuition, but none deeper than this one. And this particular upending carries with it a threat, as yet unresolved, to special relativity—a foundation stone of our 21st-century physics.”

Was Einstein Wrong?: A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity – Scientific American

The LHC in 3D

Ready to zip and zoom around the LHC? Photographer Peter McCready has created an online virtual tour of the Large Hadron Collider, giving us a fabulous inside look at the CMS Detector and even the Control Room.

http://petermccready.com/portfolio/08082004.html

New YouTube Channel

I’m excited to announce my new YouTube channel at: www.youtube.com/kellyneill

The channel offers over 150 videos on Quantum Physics, Consciousness, and the Mind-Body connection, featuring luminaries such as Richard Feynman, David Bohm, Amit Goswami, John Hagelin, Richard Feynman, Fred Alan Wolf, Amit Goswami, Dean Radin, Bruce Lipton, Deepak Chopra and more…

I hope you’ll visit soon!

Putting the Squeeze on Photons

“In the U of T experiment, the physicists combined three separate photons of light together inside an optical fibre, to create a triphoton. “A strange feature of quantum physics is that when several identical photons are combined, as they are in optical fibres such as those used to carry the Internet to our homes, they undergo an ‘identity crisis’ and one can no longer tell what an individual photon is doing,” Steinberg said.

The authors then squeezed the triphotonic state to glean the quantum information that was encoded in the triphoton´s polarization…”

Physicists are first to ’squeeze’ light to quantum limit – Physorg.com

Definitely *not* physics…

Time to build a transporter?

This post is definitely not about physics, unless we’re applying a “what goes up must come down” principle to Wall Street. It’s just that I have a lot of conversations with people about the economy lately — including a few conversations that make me want to beam to another galaxy.

I woke up this morning pondering what is happening to the US economy, and intrigued by how things might unfold in both the short- and long-term. Many of my friends are moving money around these days — out of the market and into savings accounts. Some are convinced that their money is safe or somewhat safe in those accounts because they are FDIC insured.

I’m no economist, but I don’t think the US dollar is “safe,” period… And I know the FDIC can’t handle another major collapse without needing to be bailed out itself.

As far as FDIC-insured accounts are concerned, the FDIC is seriously undercapitalized. They only had net assets of $53 billion *before* the collapses of IndyMac, Fannie and Freddy — to cover over $13.4 trillion in deposits. It’s been estimated that 2,200 of the 8,500 FDIC-insured banks will go belly up, amounting to $410 billion in FDIC payouts. That’s 10 times what the FDIC has left. With the failure of even one more major bank (i.e., WaMu), the FDIC will need additional capital… So where will that money come from?

If this current situation plays out as anticipated by many economists, the dollar will lose as much as 80% of its purchasing power. Though there may not be a run on the banks like there was in the 1930’s, this ongoing contraction of the investment markets cannot be controlled via bailouts and the end result will be the same: More money printed to replace the money lost. And the more money printed, the less that money will be worth. All to say that as these failures and buyouts continue to occur depositors will probably get their FDIC-insured money back (albeit at their own expense as taxpayers), but that money will purchase a *lot* less than it did when it was first deposited.

Also, thanks in large part to the US spending $720 million a day on an unjustifiable (and ultimately unwinnable) war in Iraq, our government is now dependent on foreign investment to float its growing debt. It’s a sure thing that as the dollar continues to depreciate, foreign investment in our deficit spending will grind to a halt… And when countries like China stop providing investment in US debt, we’d best plant vegetable gardens and take our FDIC-insured dollar bills and use them for fireplace kindling, ’cause that paper sure as hell ain’t gonna buy groceries or pay the heating bill.

What to do as this scenario plays out?

I mean, what’s the call?

Buy gold?

Latinum?

Real estate? … In another country?

On another planet?

I don’t know, but short-term or long-term, the US dollar looks like a fool’s bet now. Personally, I am having the urge to spend while the spending is good, lol…. And then plant that aforementioned garden.

Better yet, I’d like to build a transporter…. Ah, yes… I hear Andevian II is lovely this time of year.

Open to discussion on this… Hit me back with your thoughts if you feel so inclined.

I… am… speechless…

Photons Do The Darnedest Things!

“Physicists at the University of Geneva achieved the weird result by creating a pair of ‘entangled’ photons, separating them, then sending them down a fibre optic cable to the Swiss villages of Satigny and Jussy, some 18 kilometres apart…”

Physicists Spooked By Faster-Than-Light Information Transfer – Nature

(Okay, wait a minute… Were they really “spooked”? I mean, *really*??)

5 Scientific Theories Explained

Now I understand everything, thanks to this excellent and informative article, penned by Michael Swaim and brought to my attention by my good friend and fellow blogger, Iain Hamp:

“… Actually imagining just how infinitesimal you are in the scope of the universe is like autoerotic asphyxiation: it’s not as pleasant as you’d think, and if you do it wrong you can end up a vegetable…”

More here. But pee first… It’s that funny!

5 Scientific Theories That Will Make Your Head Explode – Cracked.com

What About Blob?

“Even though it was discovered by a Dutch primary school teacher it’s not a fairytale, in fact, it’s a ‘cosmic ghost’ that could possibly represent a new class of astronomical objects.

While volunteering with the Galaxy Zoo project – which enlists the public to help classify galaxies online – the 25 year old teacher Hanny van Arkel, discovered the strange, gaseous object with a hole in the middle.

‘At first, we had no idea what it was. It could have been in our solar system, or at the edge of the universe,’ Yale University astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski, a member and co-founder of the Galaxy Zoo team, said in a statement.

The discovery was nicknamed ‘Hanny’s Voorwerp,’ which is Dutch for object….”

Dutch Teacher Discovers New Astronomy Object – Red Orbit

God’s First Photo Op, the JDEM, and Hubble

God’s First Photo Op, the JDEM, and Hubble… Who says the space race is over? Or that the PR machines aren’t churning up their own sort of dark matter faster than the speed of light?

“UK astronomers, as part of an international team, have reached a milestone in the construction of one of the largest ever cameras to detect the mysterious dark energy component of the Universe. The pieces of glass for the five unique lenses of the camera have been shipped from the US to France to be shaped and polished into their final form. The largest of the five lenses is one metre in diameter, making it one of the largest in the world…

Huge Lenses To Observe Cosmic Dark Energy – Science Centric

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“Unrealistic cost estimates could make an ambitious NASA space mission to study dark energy no better than ground-based projects, experts warn…”

Can The US Get Beyond Einstein? – New Scientist

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“In a series of five spacewalks, astronauts will give the Hubble a new set of gyroscopes to stabilize the telescope and install both a thermal blanket to protect internal workings from the extreme temperatures of space and a new set of batteries to extend its lifespan to 2013… Astronauts also will install a new wide-field camera to study dark energy and a cosmic origins spectrograph that will examine the large scale structure of the universe….”

Mission aims to restore Hubble – Baltimore Sun

Hartle-Hawking, anyone?

“Sometimes cosmology talks can be exciting – riveting even. Take, for instance, the occasion when a young graduate student called Alan Guth heard all about the serious problems with the big bang theory. It was so provocative and stimulating it led Guth, now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to make one of the most audacious suggestions in science.

Guth’s idea is called inflation and it suggested that the major problems in cosmology could be solved if the universe had blown up like a balloon, inflating faster than the speed of light in the moments after its birth…”

Inflation deflated? The Big Bang’s Toughest Test – New Scientist

“These Go To 11″ (Dimensions)

“Visiting a particle accelerator is like a religious experience, at least for Nima Arkani-Hamed.

Immense detectors surround the areas where inconceivably small particles slam into one another at super-high energies, collisions that may confirm Arkani-Hamed’s predictions about undiscovered properties of nature.

Arkani-Hamed is only in his mid-30s, but he has distinguished himself as one of the leading thinkers in the field of particle physics.

His revolutionary ideas about the way the universe works will finally be put to the test this year at Switzerland’s Large Hadron Collider, which will be the world’s most powerful particle accelerator…”

Colliding With Nature’s Best Kept Secrets – CNN

Higgs Race Heats Up

“In a vast circular underground tunnel below the French-Swiss border, the final pieces of a gigantic machine are being set in place for an extraordinary investigation into the infinitely small at CERN: Europe’s atom-smashing laboratory.

If things go according to plan, the greatest experiment in the history of particle physics could unveil a sub-atomic component, the Higgs Boson, which is so tantalising that it has been called ‘the God Particle’”…

Greatest Experiment Ever in Particle Physics Nears Countdown – AFP