In the world of science, the excitement doesn’t mount much higher than the frenzy Wednesday around the announcement that scientists at the world’s biggest atom smasher may have found the “God particle.”
The discovery is called a boson, a class of sub-atomic particle, but the description stopped just short of confirming that it’s the long-sought Higgs boson particle.
While there are still questions to ask and research to do to confirm it is indeed the Higgs boson, physicists see massive implications to the discovery.
“It’s helping us understand the big universal question, which is what are we made out of,” says Philippe Di Stefano, a physics professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.
One reason the discovery of the Higgs boson particle doesn’t matter at all is that it has nothing whatsoever to do with God – other than the fact that he made it just like he made everything else. In fact, it derives the name “God particle” from “goddam particle”, an epithet it acquired because it was so difficult to find.
So its discovery will bring us no closer to God than we were before. In fact, a four year old Christian girl who is convinced that little boys derive their weighty solidity from being constructed of slugs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails rather than Higgs boson particles, is a good deal closer to the heart of reality than Peter Higgs who is an atheist.
The world as we know it is on the brink of disintegration, on the verge of dissolution. No, I’m not talking about the collapse of the Euro, of international finance, of the Western economies, of the democratic future, of the unipolar moment, of the American dream, of French banks, of Greece as a going concern, of Europe as an idea, of Pax Americana.
I am talking about something far more important. Which is why it made only the back pages of your newspaper, if it made it at all. Scientists at CERN (the European high-energy physics consortium) have announced the discovery of a particle that can travel faster than light.
[….]
It means that the “standard model” of subatomic particles that stands at the centre of all modern physics is wrong.
Nor does it stop there. This will not just overthrow physics. Astronomy and cosmology measure time and distance in the universe on the assumption of light speed as the cosmic limit. Their foundations will shake as well.
Something to note about this is that, much as the new atheists would try to convince us that science is the only means of establishing the truth of something, in actual fact science never completely settles the truth of anything.
Science has never pretended to illuminate purpose, meaning or answer the question “why?” Worse than that, since new scientific theories on the mechanics of the universe frequently overturn all prior theories, the notion that it reveals the truth in any satisfactory way is also something of a pretention.
If science has never given a final answer to anything, there is no convincing reason to suppose it ever will. What it does do is produce a never ending stream of models that approximate the object of study to lesser or greater extents.
An international team of scientists said on Thursday they had recorded sub-atomic particles traveling faster than light — a finding that could overturn one of Einstein’s long-accepted fundamental laws of the universe.
Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the researchers, told Reuters that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.
“We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing,” he said. “We now want colleagues to check them independently.”
Goodbye Einstein, welcome Star Trek warp drive, time travel and really fast Internet speeds.
Science is always changing: some things remain constant:
O Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
Out of the mouth of babies and infants,
you have established strength because of your foes,
to still the enemy and the avenger.
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him? Ps 8
It’s taken a century but scientists have finally prove that Albert Einstein was right – time really does past more quickly if you stand on a step ladder.
In a bizarre experiment using the most accurate atomic clocks ever invented, researchers showed that clocks run faster if they are raised by just 12 inches.
However, anyone hoping that a lifetime living in a basement is the secret to longevity will be disappointed.
The effect is so small that it would add just 90 billionths of a second to a 79 year life span.
The extraordinary experiment – published today in the respected journal Science – demonstrates one of the strangest consequences of Einstein’s theories of relativity.
Einstein’s work famously showed that time is relative. In 1907 his General Theory of Relativity showed that clocks run more quickly at higher altitudes because they experience a weaker gravitational force than clocks on the surface of the Earth.
It also means that your head ages more quickly than your feet, that people living on the top floor of a tower block age more quickly than those on the first floor – and that time passes more slowly for people living at sea level than it does for those on mountains.
Or maybe not: my head is about 25 but my feet and the rest of me are…. well, older.
When it is finished, Bishop Michael Bird plans to rent it for the weekend, to scour the universe for a same-sex couple to marry.
The observatory will be constructed on Cerro Armazones, a 3,000m-high mountain in Chile’s Atacama Desert.
The E-ELT (European Extremely Large Telescope) will have a primary mirror 42m in diameter – about five times the width of today’s best telescopes.
Astronomers say the next-generation observatory will be so powerful it will be able to image directly rocky planets beyond our Solar System.
It should also be able to provide major insights into the nature of black holes, galaxy formation, the mysterious “dark matter” that pervades the Universe, and the even more mysterious “dark energy” which appears to be pushing the cosmos apart at an accelerating rate.
The Orbo bunch are still at it: if they are to be believed, they have produced a motor that returns more energy than it consumes, which means – free energy. The problem is, it violates the first law of thermodynamics and even Richard Dawkins knows that is impossible.
An amazing image of an ant lifting 100 times its body weight has won first prize in a science photography contest.
The image shows an Asian weaver ant hanging upside down on a glass-like surface and holding a 500mg (0.02oz) weight in its jaws.
It was taken by zoology specialist Dr Thomas Endlein of Cambridge University as he researched insects’ sticky feet.
Dr Endlein won £700 in photographic vouchers from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.
The research shows how ants change the size and shape of the pads on their feet to enable them to carry heavier loads.
He hopes it could help scientists develop better glues.
“The pads on ants’ feet are self-cleaning and can stick to almost any type of surface,” he said.
“No man-made glue or adhesive system can match this. Understanding how animals can control their adhesive systems should help us come up with clever adhesives in the future.”
I just want to make sure that everyone understands that no Design was used in the making of this ant.
Scientists may have caught their first ever glimpse of “dark matter” – the mysterious, invisible substance that makes up three quarters of the matter of the universe.
Traces of two “dark matter particles” were picked up by highly sensitive detectors buried 2,000 ft below the ground at the bottom of an old iron mine, researchers report today.
The scientists say there is a three in four chance that the observations are genuine particles of dark matter, rather than just background noise.
Dark matter is one of the big mysteries of physics and its discovery would be one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the last 100 years.
In the 1930s astronomers first realised that the stars, gas and dust only made up a fraction of the matter of the universe. They concluded that galaxies would fall apart unless they were held in place by the gravitational pull of some vast, invisible substance.
For more than 80 years, scientists have debated what this dark matter could be and why we can’t see it.
One of the most likely candidates is a tiny object called a “weakly interactive massive particle” or Wimp which bombards the earth from space.
And to prove that even science can be funny:
Researchers have been looking for traces of Wimps for the last nine years at the bottom of a disused Soudan iron mine in Minnesota.
I remember sometime in the early 1980s John Bothwell, then Bishop of Niagara, writing an article in the – by today’s measure – much thicker Niagara Anglican denouncing the frivolity of fibre optic research, since its only application appeared to be in decorative lamps. Bothwell was, of course, almost as ignorant of technology as he was of theology, so he was quite shocked when someone pointed out that fibre optics made his phone work.
The clergy – bishops in particular – seem to be natural Luddites and so, had Bothwell heard of quantum physics, he would have had no use for it either. Today his phone probably has chips in it, so now quantum mechanics is making his phone work; and will soon make it work better:
Handheld devices could soon have pressure-sensitive touch-screens and keys, thanks to a UK firm’s material that exploits a quantum physics trick.
The technology allows, for example, scrolling down a long list or webpage faster as more pressure is applied.
A division of Samsung that distributes mobile phone components to several handset manufacturers has now licensed the “Quantum Tunnelling Composite”.
The approach could find use in devices from phones to games to GPS handsets.
In January, Japanese touch-screen maker Nissha also licensed the approach from Yorkshire-based Peratech, who make the composite material QTC.
However, as part of the licensing agreements, Peratech could not reveal the phone, gaming, and device makers that could soon be using the technology to bring pressure sensitivity to a raft of new devices.
Quantum mace
The composite works by using spiky conducting nanoparticles, similar to tiny medieval maces, dispersed evenly in a polymer.
None of these spiky balls actually touch, but the closer they get to each other, the more likely they are to undergo a quantum physics phenomenon known as tunnelling.
Tunnelling is one of several effects in quantum mechanics that defies explanation in terms of the “classical” physics that preceded it.
Simply put, quantum mechanics says that there is a tiny probability that a particle shot at a wall will pass through it in an effect known as tunnelling.
Similarly, the material that surrounds the spiky balls acts like a wall to electric current. But as the balls draw closer together, when squashed or deformed by a finger’s pressure, the probability of a charge tunnelling through increases.
The net result is that pressing harder on the material leads to a smooth increase in the current through it.
The quest to build a perpetual motion machine has been around for at least 400 years; for a perpetual motion machine to be “perpetual”, it has to generate more energy than it consumes – if it did not, the energy lost in overcoming friction and in heat generation would leave insufficient energy to drive the machine and it would stop. The problem is, a perpetual motion machine violates the first and possibly the second law of thermodynamics, two foundational laws of physics.
An early effort to generate a perpetual motion machine was the Water Screw.
It was a dismal failure.
In fact all attempts at a perpetual motion machine have been dismal failures and, today, no one bothers to try – we all believe those laws of thermodynamics.
Everyone, that is, but an Irishman call Sean McCarthy, CEO of Steorn, who claims to have discovered some hitherto unknown property of electromagnetism that allows a generator to produce more energy than is fed in to power it, essentially creating a free energy source. The only tiny problem is that the generator violates the first law of thermodynamics – meaning it is impossible.
Early attempts to demonstrate a working model of this Orbo – as it is called – machine failed in 2007 to howls of derision from sceptics. The Orbo generator is fed from a battery which it, in turn, recharges; with an intact 1st law of thermodynamics, less energy must be generated than consumed and so the battery will run down and the machine stop. Not so for Orbo, says Sean McCarthy because it uses “time variant magnetic interactions, i.e. magnetic interactions whose efficiency varies as a function of transaction timeframes.” No, I have no idea what that is either, but Steorn attempts to explain:
It is this variation of energy exchanged as a function of transaction time frame that lies at the heart of Orbo technology, and its ability to contravene the principle of the conservation of energy. Why? Conservation of energy requires that the total energy exchanged using interactions are invariant in time. This principle of time invariance is enshrined in Noether’s Theorem.
The time variant nature of Orbo interactions can be engineered using two basic techniques. The first technique utilizes a method of controlling the response time of magnetic materials to make them time variant. This is achieved by controlling the MH position of materials during permanent magnetic interactions.
The second technique decouples the Counter Electromotive Force (CEMF) from torque for electromagnetic interactions. This decoupling of CEMF allows time variant magnetic interactions in electromagnetic systems.
That didn’t help me, much, but I know from the comments on my blog that most readers are much brighter than I, so I expect someone will understand.
Wired had some critical things to say about the initial 2007 demonstration and seems to be convinced that there is a “man behind the curtain” making the allegedly successful 2009 version of the generator work. You can see it for yourself as a live stream on the Steorn website along with some other experiments and talks.
There is a December 2009 experiment that can be viewed and a January 2010 experiment still to come. The December experiment shows a more or less conventional DC motor with a permanent magnet rotor and a stator wound with toroidal coils; this is an odd choice since toroidal wound coils produce a small external magnetic field and so make very inefficient motors. Nevertheless, it does appear to run and, unless the whole exercise is a hoax, produces no back EMF – something else that should be impossible.
So, Sean McCarthy is either a conman busy making a useless 21st C perpetual Water Screw, or is about to be everyone’s hero – except Al Gore’s whose green energy companies would lose billions; for that reason alone I am cheering on McCarthy.
Watch the videos – they are interesting. Here’s the Orbo for dummies video:
