Now, you have to admit that this is a question that will twist the bawain just a bit.  Why? because if you subscribe to either Newtonian or Eisensteinian physics - your going to look at the question differently and therefore your answer is going to vary accordingly.

The question at hand is one that was posited on Slashdot

The question at hand was "How Big Was the Universe When it Was First Born?"  You would think "simple enough" at first blush, that was until it was time to actually answer.   My very first inclination was to answer like a good quantum particle man and answer "at the time of the big bang, the
structure that would come to be the universe was an infinitely small potential but still, calling it potential is really unfair.  Much as calling a Nuclear reaction, "potential" after the first control rod has been raised. Nothing has happened yet, but the release of a great amount of power is all but a given.

So considering how everything tends to be relative, we know how far or the distance covered by a contemporary light year, but what of pre-big bang?

Why?  Well according to the article - traveling back from the big bang  to the very end of inflation and the start of the hot, dense state that scientists identify with as pre-Big Bang, and ask how  big would it be? (I really have to ask here if relativity can be brought into play. If we are asked about a definitive state, isn't that state relative?)  Depending on the particulars of when inflation came to an end, the answer is somewhere between the size of a soccer ball and the size of a city block, no smaller and no larger. 

But that would almost have to be relative to where you are making the observations and could you even make an observation outside?

my bwain hurtz :(

Erwin Schrödinger's Birthday! Event Attended by a Rather Strange Cat.

Have those of you that frequent Google noticed the Algebra and cats in the Google Doodle section? This is in  celebration of professor  Erwin Schrödinger's Birthday!  

Schrödinger is known for asking the rather simplistic sounding question, When does a quantum system stop existing as a superposition of states and become one or the other?  He is perhaps better known for the thought experiment that bares his name - Schrödinger's Cat which asks if a cat were placed in a box with a radio-isotope, Geiger counter, a lump of cyanide and a bucket of water.  Say the isotope has a half life of 30 minutes.  Within that 30 minutes, if the counter detects an event it will then cause the lump to be dropped into the water killing the cat.  None of which can be detected from outside.  The experiment asks that at the end of the test period, when do we know the state of the cat, plus noting that during the test period the cat can be said to be both states or a superposition of states. 

Fun stuff that huh? Well I am drifting a bit away from the main subject, but do I have a funny joke about this...... but anyway.  Happy Birthday! 

Reference from Lance Ulanoff writing for Mashable

RIP: Heinrich Rohrer Father of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope

Heinrich Rohrer is often called the father of nanotechnology.  Rohrer with the help of his research partner Gerd Binnig of the IBM Research Laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1979, patented the  Scanning Tunneling Microscope which for the first time in history allowed scientists to see individual atoms.  The pair shared the 1986 Nobel prize in physics which they also shared with physicist Ernst Ruska, who designed the first electron microscope in the 1930s.

Not only did the microscope allow scientists to see atoms,  it also allowed the construction and manipulation of extremely small objects — because their device could be used to move atoms around on a surface.

Heinrich Rohrer - the father of nanotechnology, died of natural causes - May 16 at his home in Wollerau, Switzerland, at the age of 79.

Read more at the LA Times article HERE

Thanks to listener Dan for the heads up

Double Slit Experiment: easily reproducable

I know....one of my favorite hobby horses this one.  But I truly love experiments that screw with our perception of our environment.  One of the fundamental ones deals with our perception of frequencies in the visible light band.

The famous dual slit experiment which showed that light was a wave was first put forth by Thomas  Young in the early 1800.  In this video, we are shown that complicated machinery to demonstrate the phenom.  

Check out the video.

Super Sonic Ping Pong Ball?!

You read that right! On Brain Waves at Purdue University, here is a fascinating demonstration  about the physics of a supersonic air gun.  Towards the end a demonstration of a supersonic ping pong ball shooter. The amount of energy that they are capable of packing into such a small sphere with simple air pressure is truly amazing. Check it out.

Quantum Computers to Compete with Home Computers?

A "Quantum Computer" has for the most part been the minion of science fiction.  Using quantum states for logic instead of 1s and zeros used by today's computer logic systems.  A quantum logic state can  store more than 1 and do it at virtually no power consumption.

Any one of these would make a home or business computers vastly more efficient.  But Physicists believe that a true Quantum computer is still way into the future.  

Now, several teams have demonstrated a "quantum" speed-up that if perfected could give the standard computer a very real competition! Scientists at MIT, studying the effect, have said that the mechanical computation of Quantum may just be possible which would mean that calculations that take hours and days, might be able to complete in a fraction of the time.

Read the Wired / Science Now article HERE

Milky Way Sized Black Hole Seems To be Waking

Everything is relative.... How many times have you heard that, huh? We look at our sun, solar system and Milky Way and find that for the most part they are all about the same in a relative kind of way. Then we find that some of these galaxies have monstrous black holes at their centers. But far from being a deal breaker, the Milky Way has one of these animals at its center as well. A huge 4 thousand Sols in fact and scientist now are saying that eventually ALL galaxies will have these monsters at their centers as well. So, again things are the same relatively speaking.

And now along comes another deal breaker. In 2010 a team of astronomers spotted what appeared to be a flare from a previously inactive black hole in a galaxy about two billion light-years away. What caught my eye in this article was not that the black hole seemed to be waking up or even that another galaxy HAD a super massive black hole - as super massive black hole with an event horizon the size of the milky Way! (I say event horizon because in reality a black hole is infinitely long and infinitely narrow at the opening. However its influence spreads far from the opening, with huge warpings of space time. The event horizon is that point of influence where light itself can no longer escape from being drawn into the central opening. )

complete article here

Evaporating Black Holes Hint At Gravity May Not Be A Fundamental Force

This article in the Daily Galaxy  hints at some really troubling ideas.  Since 2011 researchers at the University of York  have been doing research on black holes that changes fundamentally how we view the "permanence" of a singularity.

Up to this point it has universally accepted that anything that crossed the "event horizon" of a black hole  can never crawl back across and escape.  This even in light of Dr. Hawkings modifying his position slightly  on the total loss of information.

However the York researchers study suggests that information can and does escape leads them to suggest that gravity alone may NOT be an all encompassing fundamental force but

• "that space, time and even gravity itself may be emergent properties within a deeper theory," said Samuel Braunstein.  

As you might guess, many physicists  are skeptical that quantum mechanic which is primarily used to describe light and sub-atomic particles can be applied to fundamental forces of nature as it operates in a black hole.  Many feel that it's hard to properly describe the evaporating black hole without the effects of gravity on the system.

From the Article:

• "We cannot claim to have proven that escape from a black hole is truly possible, but that is the most straight-forward interpretation of our results,"  said Samuel Braunstein

read the complete Daily Galaxy article here

Quantum Entanglement At the Macroscopic Level?

Boing Boing has an article that will roast a few brain cells. Macroscopic Quantum Entanglement. That's right Macroscopic - big enough to be seen by the naked eye. Quantum always meant sub-atomic particle physics to me but here we are, demonstrable entanglement of something you can hold in your hands.

This effect was demonstrated on a pair of diamond crystals, large enough to be seen by the naked eye! In this case, the crystals were 3 millimeters wide and were placed 15 centimeters apart. From the article:

• A vibration in the crystals could not be meaningfully assigned to one or other of them: both crystals were simultaneously vibrating and not vibrating.
• 
  
• Einstein called this phenomenon "spooky action at a distance," and scientists still don't understand how it's possible.

This effect is usually only observed in quantum particles and only at ultra cold conditions, never with objects large enough to be seen. Plus it it not a universally accepted phenomenon either.

Complete Boing Boing article here

Will The Universe Ever Truly End?

Hey, ready to get your mind twisted? Ok, here we go.

It has been observed that the universe is expanding and at the edge of the universe the expansion is accelerating. Astronomers have extrapolated this accelerating expansion to such a point that at some point in the vastly distant future all matter will so separated that everything stops as all energy is used up.

Well Roger Penrose in a word calls this view boring, matter of fact, incredibly boring. He wrote in

Cycles of Time: An extraordinary new view of the universe:

• the only remaining particles will be massless
  

This would take place because the standard theory says that the acceleration would continue and the mass of everything approaches infinity which for all intents is the same as saying that if everything is infinite mass then mass loses meaning or all is massless and therefor traveling at the speed of light. Well we know what happens when mass approaches infinite as related to space/time.... yep time slows and at some point if acceleration continues....stop or at least lose all meaning.

Read Roger Penros's exerpts here and I also see links there if you're brave enough...

Dark Energy is Fiction - Time Itself is Leaking Away!

Talk about a subject that is going to polarize discussion! Dark energy has been the darling child of astronomical physics for the better part of the last decade and now some researchers are calling it little more than junk science? This can not be going well for proponents.

But the question still has to be, if there isn't any such thing as Dark Energy, then what is pushing the universe apart at an ever increasing rate. Well me hearties tiz something right out of science fiction. Time is Running Down.

From the Daily Galaxy article:

• The idea that time itself could cease to be in billions of years - and everything will grind to a halt - has been proposed by Professor José Senovilla, Marc Mars and Raül Vera of the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, and University of Salamanca, Spain.
• They propose that there is no such thing as dark energy at all, and we’re looking at things backwards. Senovilla proposes that we have been fooled into thinking the expansion of the universe is accelerating, when in reality, time itself is slowing down.

Wow, what a way to get the skull jello wigglin huh? But think about it - distance, speed and age all have time constituents and for the most part, C is constant because of T(time) if you have to start factoring in a delta v for time things get really squirreley! (oh and don't call me out on delta v for time, you know what I mean...sheeeeeeeesh!)

Anyone remember Exhalation by Ted Chiang. It was originally played on Star Ship Sofa and I replayed it (I loved the reading that they had done so I asked to use that!) anyway Ted's story was about beings that powered themselves with compressed air, but found that their vacuum environment was being normalized and since there was less power potential the people were slowing down ever so slowly. Chiang nailed the present theory several years ago!

Ok, well I drifted off track some. As the present expansion theory explains, since light is redshifting from distant galaxies and the more pronounced the red shift the faster they are receding, hence the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate. However as the article points out:

• the accuracy of these measurements depends on time remaining invariable throughout the universe.
• If time is slowing down, ... our solitary time dimension is slowly turning into a new space dimension. Therefore the far-distant, ancient stars seen by cosmologists would from our perspective, look as though they were accelerating.......

Wild huh?

Read the rest of the Daily Galaxy article here

Matter Wins out over Antimatter!

Sounds like a prize fight don't it. In the overall scheme of things, according to an article in Yahoo News sent in by Tim Sayell, Scientists have come squarely down on the side of matter after eight exhaustive years of analyzing data from the Tevatron collider at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill.

This is good news, going the distance to explain how matter can exist at all! This is pretty amazing data when you consider that at the moment of the big bang, equal amounts of regular matter and antimatter were created. This should have guranteed that all matter should have destroyed itself at the start.

From the article:

• The current theory, known as the Standard Model of particle physics, has predicted some violation of matter-antimatter symmetry, but not enough to explain how our universe arose consisting mostly of matter with barely a trace of antimatter.....
• But this latest experiment came up with an unbalanced ratio of matter to antimatter that goes beyond the imbalance predicted by the Standard Model. Specifically, physicists discovered a 1 percent difference between pairs of decaying sub-atomic particles.

At the very least this should be a very startling item to consider. At the start of the universe, there was almost 99 times more matter than is present now. Our massive Universe is a mere ghost of what was in the beginning! Is that wild or what?

For the whole mind bending article select the title or go here

What kinds of things keep physicists up at night

Shaun Saunders send me this article from NewScientist. Here is the premise:
Recently:

• at the Perimeter Institute, in Waterloo, Canada, a panel of physicists was asked: "What keeps you awake at night?"

Those the responses were varied as one would suspect, a pattern of sorts showed up along several lines of interest.

• What is everything made of?

Ordinary matter, from atoms to galaxies are made of the same stuff. But that "stuff" only accounts for 4% of the total energy/mass of the universe. Physicists are very interested in "dark matter" - hypothetical matter that is undetectable by its emitted radiation, but whose presence can be inferred from gravitational effects on visible matter. And dark matter may account for upwards of 96% of the mass of the universe. Mix in the mind numbing concept of dark energy, which appears to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, and you start to understand what physicists may have stumbled onto, something that could explain the most inner workings of the universe.

• What is the singularity?

From the article:

• Conventional theory points back to an infinitely hot and dense state at the beginning of the universe, where the known laws of physics break down.

And that is exactly what is the most disturbing about the original singularity, that there is a point at which scientific theory can no longer explain or predict what the conditions were like in those first few fractions of a second before time and space began to expand at speeds approaching or surpassing that of light.

• What is reality really?

One of the weirdest occurrences in quantum mechanics is the effect an observer has on an experiment or for that matter the universe as a whole. The ability of an observer to collapse the wave effect has been well documented, But even stranger is this from the article:

• particles that are widely separated can somehow have quantum states that are linked, so that observing one affects the outcome of the other. No one has yet fathomed how the universe seems to know when it is being watched.

The NewScientist article is well worth the read, just the "something ain't quite right here" feeling you get when things aren't quite what you thought they were. There are several more really bent questions that are posited by the article that will certainly get you thinking.

Physicists Measure Persistent Current

Ready to get your frontal lobes juggled? Let's check out Persistent Current. Let me set the stage here or the weirdness might blow a hole out the back of your skull. We all understand that tricky particle called an electron. We know that if you hook a battery up to a light, electrons flow in the circuit. If you remove the battery, electrons stop flowing, right?

Ummm nope - according to Physicists at Yale University. Ok to be fair, we really can't talk about lights, wires and batteries, (well maybe the wires...) and instead discuss the weirdness that happens in tiny rings of metal wire. What the Yale scientists have documented is a strange quantum mechanical effect that influences how electrons travel through metals.

Ok, lets revisit our light bulb and battery concoction. We understand that the current we know is flowing is electrons being pushed along the wire. The current is the electron's motion. So what do we consider the motion of electrons that constantly circle the nucleus of an atom? Is that not the very essence of electrical current? Atoms have electrons that are in constant motion and will continue in motion forever. Persistent Current.

No, this is not ZeroPoint , perpetual, or any other kind of untouched energy just waiting to be exploited.

from the Science Daily article:

• ...it is so faint and sensitive to its environment that physicists were unable to accurately measure it until now. It is not possible to measure the current with a traditional ammeter because it only flows within the tiny metal rings, which are about the same size as the wires used on computer chips.

Just attempting to measure it directly can disrupt it, but the current CAN be measured indirectly.
You can read more on this mind twisting current in this Science Daily article

Most Meteorites Come from Asteroid Belt, Not from N.E.O.s

Contrary to what would be expected, MIT researchers have discovered that most meteorites do not originate as Near Earth Objects (N.E.O.s) but "fast track" from the asteroid belt.

Puzzled by a discrepancy between the type of meteorites that typically strike the Earth ("stony objects, rich in the mineral olivine and poor in iron") and the type of asteroids that form the majority of N.E.O.s, researchers discovered that most meteorites had to be from the inner Asteroid Belt.

They found that most of these objects were gradually disturbed by the Yarkovsky effect, which is the slight effect caused by the sun heating part of the asteroid which then radiates the heat as it rotates, causing a slight wobble in the asteroid's orbit. This can sometimes cause an asteroid to be ejected from the Asteroid Belt and into the Earth's path.

This study is good news for protecting the Earth from impact as it adds to our understanding of what type of asteroid is likely to impact and therefore what methods might be most effective in dealing with a threat.

<Full article from PhysOrg.com>

Warp Engine - Possible?

I was reading through some of the listings on Discover News and I came across this headline

• Warp Drive Engine Would Travel Faster Than Light

And I am thinking uh duh that's what warp engines do right?! But I kept reading and the article kept making more and more sense. But the real laugh is I think I saw this concept on an episode of Futurama. Anyway -

• Two Baylor University physicists have outlined how a faster-than-light engine could possibly work. The warp engine, based on a design first proposed in 1994 by Michael Alcubierre, involves expanding the fabric of space behind a ship into a bubble and shrinking space-time in front of the ship. The ship would rest in between the expanding and shrinking space-time, essentially surfing down the side of the bubble. The ship wouldn't actually move; space itself would move underneath the stationary spacecraft. A beam of light next to the ship would still zoom away, same as it always does, but a beam of light far from the ship would be left behind.
• It is thought that this has happened once before in the cosmos' history - the big bang.
  

Quite simply that if a beam of light and the ship left the same relative space time local, the ship, utilizing it engine, would arrive well ahead of the beam of light. Relative to any other beam of light traveling relatively tangent to the ship, the ship would not be ftl, but since it beat a beam of light from its own space/time, it is in fact Faster than light. Not a play on words (Einstein flat out said this could not take place) or a trick of what gets taken away from what first. Given enough energy, possible? My sticking point to ftl is the energy curve. To accelerate any mass you need energy. To double the speed, you do not need double the energy, you need geometrically more energy. If you have mass and you acellerate to the physical limit of the universe, it stands to reason that you would need all the energy of the universe. Since the stars are still shining is proff that no one has gone ftl. But what if you are not accelerating mass, but distorting space time. At present we only know of one way to do that effectivly and that is with massive objects. Round and round we go. But is sure is interesting.

<- Read complete article in Discovery News ->

Botanist sues to stop CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe

A lawsuit has been filed in Hawaii in hopes to stop the start of operations by the Large Hadron Collider atom-smasher on the French-Swiss border. Walter L Wagner biologist and sometime physicist says that the LHC may rip a hole in the fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the Earth. He wants the US government to act now and delay the LHC's startup while a new safety review is carried out. One of Wagner's concerns is that scientists at the colider, might slip up and create a miniature black hole. This would then suck in surrounding mass, gaining unstoppably in size and power in a runaway process until it had engulfed the entire Earth and packed it down inside its swelling, inescapable event horizon.

I am afraid that this is about as serious as the Register takes this story and they gleefully traipse off into quantum physics fairyland in a most humorous manner. Click on the article title for complete foolishness....

{via Boing Boing}

Super Mario World Explores Quantum Physics

ahuh...I hear you say...and Paul has finally become rubber room material. And to be quite frank, when I first watched this video I was confused as all get out. But then I got it...quantum multiple universes. Every action has an infinite amount of possibilities. Here, the explanation or better, the demonstration is taken in a funny and unusual direction. As the article states: What you're seeing ... is 134 playthroughs of Kaizo layered upon each other using a custom SNES emulator. - or every choice, having generated a "new universe". Weird and dare I say cute?

Thane Heins' Perepiteia device

I will be the first to admit that I am not the brainiest person going, however I think I have a basic grasp of physics and conservation of energy as well as a working knowledge of thermodynamics. So when someones asks what happens when you put an electrical load on an engine or generator, I have to say that the load is 180 degrees in opposition so the net effect of the load is to slow the whole system down by a factor dependent on the work being done by the system and the load applied. That being said, take a look at Thane Heins' Perepiteia device. Quite simply it is an induction engine with a magnetic core inserted into it rotor. To this engine's rotor is coupled a ring of magnets and facing these magnets are inductor coils. In other words a generator. Anyone that understands basic electricity knows as you spin the engine the magnets will induce a current in the coils. If you hook up a light to the coils, which is a load, you will slow the system down because your causing resistance in the coils. Now the exercise here is, what happens when you put a maximum load on the coils or "shorting" them? This puts infinite resistance on the system from the motor's perspective so that to maintain the same level of "work" more power must be supplied to the engine.

Enter the Perepiteia and a major headache. Remember the only difference in this machine and a generator is that the Perepiteia has an inductive core in the rotor. When the device is started all the coils report voltage - as you would expect. Then when Heins shorts out the coils, instead of slowing down the system as you would expect - the motor speeds up. Heins explains that the coils load is back emf (electro motive force) which is inducted into the engine by way of the inductive core in the rotor, thus strengthening the motor's existing magnetic field.

Oh I hear the BS! and capacitive inductance! cat calls....but I watched the videos of this piece of
black magic in action, I can not see the trick. Check it out, I need an asprin.

Here is the Boing Boing article and a link to the videos of the device in action.

Surf's Up! and it's bringing in an new GUT!

Shaun Saunders sends in this article from the Uk's Telegraph online

The headline reads:
Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything!

An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists. Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder. Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics. Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years," he says. The new theory reported today in New Scientist has been laid out in an online paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" by Lisi, who completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1999 at the University of California, San Diego.

Click article title or here for complete story