The World of Wild

Last Lions

2012-01-27T15:29:00.001-05:00

Fifty years ago, a quarter of a million lions roamed the savannahs of Africa.

Today, they number about 10,000.

96% of the world’s wild lions have disappeared in the last half-century.

My children will almost certainly live to see the day when there are no more lions living in the wild. In fact, I might even live to see it.

Climatology

2012-01-27T12:25:00.001-05:00

If you've wondered why we have missed half our winter:

"The jet stream is fueled by the North Atlantic and Arctic Oscillations, which are climate patterns determined by differences in sea-level pressure. A positive pressure difference, which is what we've been experiencing in the past few months, draws warm air from the southwest over the Eastern United States instead of cold air from the Arctic which is what happened last year and why tons of snow dumped on us.

Piling on the weather weirdness, La Niña conditions have pushed warm water toward Australia, decreasing Pacific Ocean temperatures off the U.S. to about 5 degrees lower than normal. That also means less precipitation, because colder water is less likely to evaporate..."

"The weather oscillations over the North Atlantic Ocean and in the Arctic have been off-the-charts extreme in recent years, likely driven at least in part by the precipitous decline in the volume of Arctic sea ice. This is something which warrants close attention and further study, and what happens with atmospheric patterns in the far north also directly affects weather to the south of there. An example of that is the past three winters including this one."

Meteorologists say the jet stream will oscillate back in the next few weeks giving us a wintery end to our non-winter.

"Danger, Will Robinson!"

2012-01-27T12:20:00.001-05:00

Dick Tufeld, the voice of the robot on Lost in Space, has died.

"That does not compute"

2012 BX34

2012-01-27T10:32:00.001-05:00

There’s an asteroid passing by Earth today, right about now I suppose. It’s the closest approach of a near-miss asteroid ever recorded, it will pass us at about 1/5 the distance to the moon, or within 50,000 miles.

This is a small one, about the size of a bus, so tiny it was only detected on Wednesday.

No chance it will hit the Earth, but nice to know I guess.

Graphene

2012-01-27T10:07:00.000-05:00

Prediction: we're going to hear a lot about Graphene in the years to come.

This is a very new material (not even in my spell checker dictionary yet), created by forming carbon into a one-atom-thick honeycomb membrane. Scientists Andrei Geim and Konstantin Novoselov from the University of Manchester were awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics for discovering it.

Most people have never heard of it, but it's going to be huge. And that's because Graphene has some amazing properties not found in any other material:

It's 100 times stronger than steel.

It conducts electricity as good as copper.

It is so thin it's transparent.

It conducts heat better than any material known to science.

It blocks the passage of all gasses but allows water vapor to pass through easily. This is not a small thing. Helium gas can leak through glass, but graphene stops it, while letting the much larger water vapor molecules through. This is very strange behavior for a material.

Graphene is called a 2-dimensional material, because it is one atom thick - basically as thin as anything you can make. When you roll it up it creates a 1-dimensional Nanotube.

The picture above is an electron microscope image of multiple layers of graphene lying atop each other like bed sheets.

You can just imagine the usefulness of a product like this. The semiconductor industry has big plans to use graphene in CPU and GPU units...it's a game changer, allowing the creation of transistors that are far smaller and far faster than anything yet constructed. You can create heat sinks. You can filter contaminants, or even distill alcohol with it. You can use it to support samples for electron microscope viewing because it is so thin and so strong and so clear. And Graphene is so resistant to so many materials, you can use it as a protective coating.

Development of these applications will take a few years, but they are surely coming.

And here's something very interesting...while Graphene was formally discovered in 2004 and is very difficult to manufacture perfectly, it is highly likely that you create it every time you use a graphite pencil. Some of the graphite flakes shed from pencils turn out to be single-atom-thick graphene sheets.

Git 'er Done!

2012-01-27T09:03:00.001-05:00

"The Republican presidential candidate with the line of credit at Tiffany's is making fun of the candidate with the Swiss bank account. The one who got wealthy working the inside Washington game is whaling away at the one who got wealthy working the angles of high finance. The economic diversity at the top of the Republican field runs the gamut from A to B. "

I think it's pretty funny that the most liberal contender for the republican nomination is the Mormon! That is very revealing of how far that party has drifted to the right.

Incidentally, history has shown that business leaders make terrible elected officials. For some reason people have been duped into thinking that if you are successful at business you should be able to run a country. Not so at all. In fact, I'd wager that the reverse is true.

It is a funny show though. On the one hand you've got this guy who clearly represents the "1%", that entity that has prospered while the middle class fails, and that thousands of people have been protesting against all year. I want to smack him every time I hear him speak, so dripping with contempt, so incredibly phony. The guy who likes to offer $10,000 bets and thinks that the distribution of wealth in America is best discussed "in quiet rooms..." which puts him squarely on the dark side.

And then there's the raving psychopath. The guy who led the effort to have Clinton impeached for getting a blowjob in the oval office while simultaneously cheating on his second wife. The guy who was kicked out of his speaker of the house position for his erratic behavior. And he wants to tell us all how to be moral. Just like him. And he wants to legislate it.

As has been said already by many people, the republican debates for 2012 are like a surreal kind of reality television. You couldn't make up crazy shit like that if you tried. As with all things money tends to win out, and so I still think it's going to be Mr 1% with the magical underwear.

Innumerous

2012-01-27T08:26:00.001-05:00

They say a lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. You have better odds of being killed by a lightning strike than winning a Powerball lottery.

If you are going to play the lottery, know that every number combination has the exact same chance of winning as any other. There are no privileged numbers.

Many people believe (I won’t use the word think) that a number that has already won somehow has less chance of winning again. Wrong. It has the exact same chance of winning again that any other number has of winning. It’s just that there are so many numbers available that the same number almost never wins again, it’s just statistics.

Same with any “lucky” number.

So people who are reasonably savvy tend to play numbers that nobody else will play. Why? Because, if you do win, you are less likely to have to split your winnings.

Well, 1,994 people never thought of that angle because they all played the number 666 and they all won. So they won, which is great for them, but had one person played 665 and had that number won, he or she would be walking away with somewhere around $783,000 instead of the $250 they’re getting now.

Last Minute

2012-01-27T08:10:00.001-05:00

The Gmail logo… “was designed by Dennis Hwang (who's responsible for most of Google's doodles at the time) the night before Gmail launched.”

And, you can tell.

Urban Word: 501k

2012-01-27T08:00:00.001-05:00

When one’s economic situation has become so tenuous that their entire net worth is in the pockets of their jeans.

“Sorry, bro, can’t go drinking tonight, the wife raided my 501k.”

Motorola 6502

2012-01-27T07:49:00.001-05:00

When Zach wants to say something is old school, he says “Dad, that’s so 8-bit!”

Signed "Epstein's Mother"

2012-01-27T07:48:00.001-05:00

Robert Hegyes has died. Epstein from one of my favorite shows when I was in middle school, Welcome Back Kotter.

Bridges

2012-01-27T07:44:00.000-05:00

A few amazing facts that really show how a few long-lived people can bridge very far back in time...

"President John Tyler's grandsons are still alive!! That's right, two exclamation points because this blows my mind. John Tyler was the 10th President of the United States. He was born in 1790 and took office in 1841. His son, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, was born in 1853, when Tyler was 63 years old. Lyon had six children with two different wives, two of whom were Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr. (born 1924 when Lyon Sr. was 71) and Harrison Ruffin Tyler (born 1928 when Lyon Sr. was 75). They are reportedly both still living in their 80s."

"Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had, in his long lifetime, shaken hands with John Quincy Adams and John F. Kennedy"

And here's an interesting one: a witness to the Lincoln assassination appeared on a game show as a guest in 1956!

Spirit of the Past

2012-01-26T07:59:00.001-05:00

I took my lovely bride to see Keb’ Mo’ at the Royal Oak Music Theater last week.

Let me tell you, that old dude was fantastic. His band sounded great, his songs are as good as you’d expect from someone who has three Grammys under his belt, and the crowd loved him.

The really cool thing to me is that he is one of the very few blues guys who made it without watering down his sound. His songs are pure blues, without the influence of pop or country or rock or anything else.

We had fantastic seats too, I got online just as they went on sale – 4^th row just off-center. Aside from the huge woman sitting next to me who took more than five agonizing minutes to get her coat off, smacking me at least ten times, our perch was perfect.

And here’s a known blues truth - when Keb’ Mo’ (Kevin Moore in case you didn’t get the slang) straps on a National Steel guitar and sings old time delta blues, you would swear you were looking at Son House brought back to life. Hell, come to think of it, Son is buried only ten miles away from that theater, in Mount Hazel Cemetery, so maybe…

Mother

2012-01-25T12:25:00.001-05:00

"You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.'" - Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, 8 April 1974.

This is a small version of the highest resolution picture of the Earth ever taken, created from composites taken on January 4, 2012.

Tilted

2012-01-25T12:03:00.001-05:00

Incidentally, talking about Martian winters brings up a good point that is perhaps not immediately obvious:

Planets do not HAVE to have seasons. In fact, we have three planets in our system that do not: Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter.

Whether or not a planet has seasons is determined by its tilt, if any, relative to the sun. Planets that are not captured (ie, planets that are formed "in situ" within their solar systems) generally start out with no relative tilt, solidly spinning on an axis which is aligned to their star, and in the same plane (called the plane of the ecliptic).

But planets are always at risk of being hit by various bodies from space - meteors, comets, asteroids, etc. And some of these objects are very large. When a planet is unlucky enough to be hit by a really big one, say a large comet, the planet can be knocked off kilter and will start to precess (spin about a wobbly axis like a top). From that point on that planet will have seasons, as the tilt affects how much sunlight hits it and at what angle, throughout the year.

Big impacts like this are uncommon in the short term, but almost inevitable if given enough time. We know that the Earth has been hit multiple times in the last few hundred million years by objects large enough to create planet-wide ecosystem collapses and mass extinctions - these were impacts caused by meteors about 5-10km in diameter. It would take a much larger collision to knock the Earth into precession, and our season-causing event (SCE, I just coined that lol) probably happened early on in the Earth's history, when it was still very hot and had no life. In those early days when the solar system was forming, there were many more objects soaring around these parts and the chance of a really big impact would have been much greater.

The impact that tilted the Earth would have been the most violent event in its history, and probably also liquefied a great deal of its crust sending molten material into our orbit and beyond. Some scientists think our moon formed from that molten material - in other words, the moon may have condensed out of material ejected from Earth during this collision. One confirmation of this is that rocks originating on the Earth (yes, they can tell) have been found on the moon. That's funny when you think about it - we sent astronauts to the moon to go bring back a few little pieces of the Earth that we lost.

The Earth now has a tilt of about 23.5 degrees, which gives us well defined seasons in most areas. Planets that have no seasons generally just lucked out and missed being hit.

Mars, Saturn, and Neptune all have tilts about the same as the Earth and they all have seasons of about the same severity.

And then there is Uranus. Poor Uranus. Uranus was the first planet discovered by telescope, in 1781. Today we know that something very, very traumatic happened to Uranus a long time ago, and that poor gas giant will never be the same.

Uranus, you see, has been whacked all the way over. It has a tilt of 98 degrees, and it's north and south poles are in the orientation of most planets equators. So it rotates perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic. The effect of this is that Uranus has very strange seasons:

"Other planets can be visualized to rotate like tilted spinning tops on the plane of the Solar System, while Uranus rotates more like a tilted rolling ball. Near the time of Uranian solstices, one pole faces the Sun continuously while the other pole faces away. Only a narrow strip around the equator experiences a rapid day-night cycle, but with the Sun very low over the horizon as in the Earth's polar regions. At the other side of Uranus's orbit the orientation of the poles towards the Sun is reversed. Each pole gets around 42 years of continuous sunlight, followed by 42 years of darkness. Near the time of the equinoxes, the Sun faces the equator of Uranus giving a period of day-night cycles similar to those seen on most of the other planets."

Uranus has huge storms, propelled by the dramatic temperature gradients, with wind speeds that often break the sound barrier (we complain about 35 mph winds, imagine 560 mph winds!)

Being knocked down flat is pretty embarrassing, but Venus actually got it worse than Uranus. You may note that above it says that Venus does not have seasons, and that is true. But that's only because when Venus' time came to pay the piper it was knocked all the way around, head over heels. Crazy as it sounds, Venus is upside down. Its North pole is on the bottom and it rotates in the opposite direction as the other planets. That's why the graphic above lists its tilt at 177 degrees. So I guess Venus lucked out to have been hit so hard and still not get seasonality.

As with most properties of our Goldilocks Earth, we have seasons that are in between "none" and "severe". Just right.

8 Years

2012-01-25T09:41:00.001-05:00

Talk about getting our money’s worth. The Opportunity mars rover has now been wheels down on Mars for eight years, and she’ still going. While Her sister Spirit is now gone, Opportunity continues to send us data and pictures, move around, and expand our knowledge of the red planet.

“Greeley Haven is Opportunity's current workplace, an outcrop with a Sun-facing slope that will allow the aging rover to soak up solar power during its fifth Martian winter*. Within reach of the rover's robotic arm are plentiful sites for scientific investigation, including inspection of mineral compositions and textures within the outcrop. A full-circle colour panorama is also on the schedule along with a radio science experiment that will record information about the tiny wobbles in Mars' rotation to provide insight into the planet's interior.”

Eight years of service is not bad for a rover designed to last 90 days. And she’s not through yet.

*What gives, you ask? Why five winters? Because the Mars year is 687 Earth days, or 1.88 Earth years. That means that although the rovers have been on Mars eight Earth years, they have been there for less than five Mars years. Same amount of absolute time of course.

No Snow

2012-01-25T07:44:00.001-05:00

“Typically by now, metro Detroit averages 21 inches of snow. So far this season, only 13 inches of snow has fallen at Metro Airport, 8 inches below normal.”

I don’t think we’ve even gotten 5 inches total at our house. Maybe less. And I’m ok with that. I miss AZ more every winter. My great mission in life is to find a way to be able to retire in Cali.

The Whole Package

2012-01-24T10:02:00.001-05:00

"Apple has a secret room devoted solely to designing product packaging and what users experience when opening a new product...the packaging room is located in a walled-off section of the company's main marketing building.

In the room, employees perform the most mundane of tasks -- opening boxes. It is said that one packaging designer spent months in the room doing just that, opening hundreds of iPod box prototypes trying to get the experience just right.

How a customer opens a box must be one of the last things a typical product designer would consider, yet for Apple, the inexpensive box merits as much attention as the high-margin electronic device inside.

Showing attention to detail at even the smallest level communicates to customers that the manufacturer cares about them. Customers then feel a bond with the company, something that transcends price points."

Anyone who has ever opened an Apple product box knows this, they are obsessive about the presentation and packaging of their products, and it shows.

Eating

2012-01-22T20:23:00.001-05:00

(watching Fantastic Mr Fox, when the fox eats breakfast - very messy with lots of growling)

Dad: "That fox eats like a wild animal"

Brooke: "He IS a wild animal. And a father and a husband"

That's an exact line from later in the movie

Burrito

2012-01-22T15:20:00.001-05:00

Air Gunner

2012-01-21T22:15:00.001-05:00

A little snow

2012-01-21T22:08:00.001-05:00

Romaine with olive oil and lemon juice

2012-01-21T22:06:00.001-05:00

RIP Etta James

2012-01-20T14:35:00.001-05:00

One of our favorite songs is “At Last”, which we used as our wedding dance.

Light Show

2012-01-20T14:30:00.000-05:00

As you know, I have a great love for science and cosmology. I seem to have a very technical side that enjoys unraveling mysteries, or at least following the work of those who do so.

But I also love beautiful things, and very often the tools and findings of science are beautiful themselves, even as they reveal the beauty of the universe.

A great example of this beauty is pictured above. The twin Keck telescopes which are perched atop an extinct volcano called Mauna Kea on the big island of Hawaii, at an elevation of 14,000 feet.

The Kecks are masterful designs, true testaments to human creativity. And they are also beautiful. From the graceful domes that protect their delicate instruments to the huge sectioned hexagonal mirrors at their hearts, they just leave me in awe. And can you think of a more beautiful location? They don’t sit there just so astronomers can work in a paradise though, Mauna Kea is a perfect location for a telescope: high elevation to minimize atmospheric distortion, no close mountains to stir up the air, very clear skies, and a thousand miles of temperature-moderating ocean all around to provide stability.

These instruments are designed to “see” in both the optical and near-infrared parts of the spectrum. The 36-section hexagonal aluminosilicate ceramic mirrors are the largest optical/Infrared mirrors in the world.

The two Kecks can work together to form what is called an astronomical interferometer with an effective mirror size of 279 feet, or they can each take observations separately.

The Kecks have one amazing feature that sets them apart from other telescopes and it’s an awesome piece of technology. Because of manufacturing issues and the warping effect of gravity on large heavy objects, segmented mirror designs are needed to produce mirrors larger than about 200 inches (the previous largest telescope, which held that title for many years, was the 200 inch Hale at Mt Palomar). So the Keck uses a set of 36 hexagonal mirrors interlocked to make one big mirror. But these mirrors have to be aligned to each other nearly perfectly. An alignment error of 1 millionth of an inch would be catastrophic to the observation. The Kecks have the most advanced alignment and drive mechanism of any telescope. The mirrors are aligned by a computer that checks their relative heights in hundreds of places twice every second. Minute corrections are made nearly instantly to bring the mirrors into alignment.

That’s all amazing, but there’s more. Because these mirrors can move independently, they can also be used to correct for atmospheric disturbances that hinder the clarity of all ground-based telescopes. The initial design of this system worked like this: the telescope has an optical sensor that locks on to a bright star (which is called the guide star) close to the site in the sky being observed. By measuring the changes in the brightness of the guide star caused by atmospheric disturbances, the system can calculate the corrections required in the mirrors and send that information to the mirror alignment computer which then corrects for them. This is called Adaptive Optics, and as implemented it was an ingenious system but it had a huge limitation: only about 1% of the sky is close enough to a star bright enough to use as the guide star. So the system was re-imagined in a very novel way

The Keck telescopes can now create their own guide stars.

“In the upper part of the Earth's mesosphere (90±10 km altitude), there is a 5-10 km thick layer rich in Sodium atoms, deposited by the ablation of micrometeorites. These atoms can be excited and caused to radiate by spontaneous emission by projecting a pulsed laser tuned to the Sodium D atomic transition (589 nm) in the direction of the science target.”

Laser Guide Star (LR)

So, using powerful lasers, the telescope can excite particles in the extreme upper atmosphere to the point that they radiate light. This light can be used as a substitute guide star for correcting atmospheric disturbances. It’s genius. This new system is called LGS AO (Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optics). You will notice that the guide star laser is a pretty orange-yellow color – that’s the color of a laser tuned to the 589 nm wavelength as needed to cause this effect on Sodium.

LGS AO works so well that the Keck telescopes now routinely produce images that are sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Kecks have produced some of the greatest discoveries in astronomy during the last decade, including the discoveries of more planets than any other instrument, including the Kepler spacecraft.

All that and of course, I think they really are beautiful to look at.

Invasion!

2012-01-20T10:13:00.001-05:00

Some kooks have recently (again) claimed that NASA is hiding a big secret: that a huge, planet-sized spacecraft has been spotted entering our solar system by one of the NASA telescopes, and is recorded on NASA’s own video feed. The “UFO” in question is seen above and looks very much like a Star Destroyer to these people.

Here is the “theory” of one such kook:

NASA is trying to hide the situation now but you can still see the first 2 days of the object's entrance at the lasco site. Click link below then input behindH12 for the telescope and the 26th through the 1st for the dates. Comparing it for size to the planetary objects that are seen in this telescope, if my calculations are correct, that thing is enormous.

The “if my calculations” part makes me laugh out loud. I can just picture some reclusive geek with just barely enough knowledge of telescopes to be dangerous, attempting to calculate the size of a lens aberration.

Yes, “that thing” has actually been seen before, many times. So persistent and chicken-littlish are these kooks that very often NASA has to eventually spend valuable resources assembling and releasing a press statement. Yet again, this Star Destroyer is not enormous, or even real: it’s an optics glitch caused by a bright object (in this case Venus) entering the lens’ field of view. Bright lights will flare lenses and cause optical anomalies, as any halfway decent photographer will tell you. I have no doubt that the official reply will not deter the kooks in the least. They will just concoct an even more elaborate conspiracy theory and keep right on thinking that the Earth will be vaporized any day now by an alien battleship.

From the NASA press release:

“The answer lies on the exact opposite side of the image. At the same time as this strange-looking feature starts being visible, the very bright planet Venus enters [the telescope’s] field-of-view from the lower left. This is not a coincidence. The strange-looking geometrical 'object' is actually an internal reflection of the planet Venus within the telescope optics. This effect has been seen many times before.”

I guess that's one way to solve that problem...

2012-01-20T09:04:00.001-05:00

“Need to keep the riff-raff off the roof of your shiny new commuter train? Do what Indonesia's state railway did and just sweep the little bastards off with a broom made of suspended concrete balls. Remember to duck.”

Greece.com

2012-01-20T08:59:00.001-05:00

"On Thursday, Apple's value on the stock market reached an all-time high of $400 billion. That figure makes it worth more than Greece."

Punishment

2012-01-20T07:54:00.001-05:00

The FBI took down the file sharing site megaupload.com, as if to punish the people of the internet for the huge protests against SOPA/PIPA.

In response, the hacker organization known as “Anonymous” launched massive Denial of Service (DOS) attacks on the Dept of Justice and the Universal Music Group, as well as numerous congressional sites, bringing them all down.

You can’t beat hackers, so it’s best not to piss them off.

Three generations of Mars rovers...they're getting bigger...

2012-01-19T21:19:00.001-05:00

iPad

2012-01-19T20:54:00.000-05:00

Old Fashioned

2012-01-19T20:52:00.001-05:00

June 30th

2012-01-19T15:08:00.001-05:00

In order to keep the atomic clocks that run the world time system in sync with the much more variable actual rotation of the Earth, a leap second will be added on June 30^th this year.

How will you spend your leap second?

I’m thinking of throwing a very tiny party.

Not looking good for Francesco...

2012-01-19T13:44:00.001-05:00

“Coast guard records published Thursday by an Italian newspaper pile further pressure on the captain of the Concordia and his officers, suggesting that the authorities first became aware of the crash from a friend of the mother of a passenger about 15 minutes after the ship hit rocks.”

Alone

2012-01-19T12:09:00.000-05:00

My mother left Brian and I off at the theater to watch a movie once, sometime in the 70’s. I think it may have been the first time she did that. I can’t remember what the movie was called but it was ironically about two kids whose mother was not around for one reason or another, and they are being raised by their father in some remote woods somewhere and he falls ill. They try to help him as much as they can but the father ends up dying, leaving the children alone.

Wonderful movie to see for our first movie alone. I still have bad feelings about that movie. And I still cannot remember what it was called. I’d love to look it up and see if it is a bad as I remember.

Ballista: gaming mice are now officially ridiculous

2012-01-19T09:13:00.001-05:00

Babbling Brooke #432

2012-01-18T18:15:00.001-05:00

Brooke pointed out a trophy at a restaurant & said "Look at that!".

Mommy: "What do you think that is?"

Brooke: "A glass of gold or something."

A Drag

2012-01-18T14:18:00.001-05:00

"Remember that time you carried that box home and it was like sooo heavy? Yeah, shut up. The quarry where some of Stonehenge's original rocks came from has been discovered, and the people of 5,000 years ago dragged them 160 miles."

Queerer than you can suppose

2012-01-18T13:38:00.003-05:00

"My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." - J.B.S. Haldane

Welcome to the world of the weird: Quantum Physics. So strange that it couldn't possibly be true, and yet it is...

"An informed list of the most profound scientific developments of the 20th century is likely to include general relativity, quantum mechanics, big bang cosmology, the unraveling of the genetic code, evolutionary biology, and perhaps a few other topics of the reader's choice. Among these, quantum mechanics is unique because of its profoundly radical quality. Quantum mechanics forced physicists to reshape their ideas of reality, to rethink the nature of things at the deepest level, and to revise their concepts of position and speed, as well as their notions of cause and effect...

Unlike general relativity, which grew out of a brilliant insight into the connection between gravity and geometry, or the deciphering of DNA, which unveiled a new world of biology, quantum mechanics did not spring from a single step. Rather, it was created in one of those rare concentrations of genius that occur from time to time in history. For 20 years after their introduction, quantum ideas were so confused that there was little basis for progress; then a small group of physicists created quantum mechanics in three tumultuous years. These scientists were troubled by what they were doing, and in some cases distressed by what they had done. The unique situation of this crucial yet elusive theory is perhaps best summarized by the following observation: Quantum theory is the most precisely tested and most successful theory in the history of science. Nevertheless, not only was quantum mechanics deeply disturbing to its founders, today-85 years after the theory was essentially cast in its current form-some of the luminaries of science remain dissatisfied with its foundations and its interpretation, even as they acknowledge its stunning power."

Quantum Mechanics has to be, for my money, the craziest thing humans have ever come up with. The implications are huge, but comprehension is very challenging precisely because our brains were not designed to think the way you need to think if you want to understand the way the universe works underneath the illusions and behind the curtain. The modern configuration of quantum physics was solidified between 1925 and 1928 by a host of brilliant and very young, unfettered minds: Pauli, Heisenberg, Born, Jordan, Schrödinger, Dirac, Fermi, Bohr. Ironically, having himself laid some of the early foundations for quantum theory, Albert Einstein never accepted it to the day he died. It was a rare case of old Al being just plain wrong. I can see why it is troubling to a great many people. Quantum theory raises a host of unsettling questions. It tugs at the very fabric of our notions of what reality should mean. It shows us a glimpse of a universe that is not neat and buttoned-up, but very messy, and very alien. I believe it's uncomfortable because all of our experience, everything we know, is of the "big world", where we only get to see the statistically normalized cumulative effects of what goes on at the subatomic level. Down there, effect doesn't always follow cause, and electrons can travel forwards or backwards in time with equal ease. (they flip their charges and are called positrons when they travel backwards in time). Quantum theory predicts (and measurements confirm) a universe that is far stranger than anyone had ever in their wildest dreams imagined.

I wanted to list a few of my favorite quantum oddities:

1. One Or The Other. The classical view of matter is that it is predictable. You can measure the position and momentum (or velocity) of matter (a car, say) using simple tools, and that measurement is very reliable. A car is where it is. And it's momentum is what it is. In the world of the very small though, that supposition breaks down spectacularly. Schrödinger showed that you can write an equation that describes every possible value of every observable quality of a given quantum system. This equation is known as the Wave Function or Wave Equation of a particle or system. And that sounds all peachy, one equation can tell you everything you need to know about a particular quantum system. Except there is a huge caveat in this devil's bargain and I'll explain it here. The probability of finding the POSITION of a particle (say, an electron) in a quantum system is given by the square of the magnitude of the function (stay with me, it's not that bad) - the POSITION of the particle is "spread out" over the 3-dimensional volume defined by the wave equation and the more spread out the volume is, the less probability you can locate it. Now, the MOMENTUM of the particle is given by the slope of the wave equation (really, stay with me). The steeper the slope, the less probability you can determine the MOMENTUM of a particle. What this all means is that to find the POSITION of a particle precisely, the wave function must be sharply peaked (to narrow down the volume it could be in). But a sharp peak requires a steep slope, and as described above, a steep slope means the spread in possible values for the MOMENTUM of the particle will be large. The opposite is also true. If you've stayed with me until now, here's the payoff: The Wave Function for a system will tell you the POSITION of a particle OR the MOMENTUM of a particle, but NOT both at the same time. Think about that one. There is NO WAY you can know those two properties of a quantum particle at the same time. If you know the position of an electron, you cannot know its momentum. And if you know the momentum, you cannot know its position. This rule is named for the first person to discover this implication of wave equations, it's called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

"The need to abandon a classical picture in which position and momentum can be determined with arbitrary accuracy, in favor of a blurred picture of probabilities, is at the heart of quantum mechanics."

2) No Sharing Allowed. When you apply the wave equation to the two electrons in a Helium atom, something very strange happens. The wave equation can tell you the positions of the two electrons, but it cannot determine which electron is which. If you were to interchange the particles, the Helium atom system should look identical. But because as stated above the position probability is based on a square, the implication is that the wave equation of the new exchanged system is either identical to or the negative of the original. If you stuff one electron into the quantum state another one occupies, the wave equation for the moved electron reverses sign. The implication of this is as follows: Two electrons in the same quantum state will have wave equations that are anti-symmetric (the negative of each other), and they will cancel out. Which collapses the probability of finding two electrons in the same quantum state down to precisely zero. This rule is called the Pauli Exclusion Principle. And it's a good thing this is true, as it accounts for the differences in size and properties between the different elemental atoms.

Ok, those are semi-strange, but a little abstract. How about something really weird?

3. Superposition. Ok, ready? A quantum system (like a Helium atom) can exist in any one of a number of stationary states, but also exists in a sum or superposition of ALL those states at the same time. What this means is that the system literally exists in every one of its possible states simultaneously. Multiple realities. Ok, that's strange enough, but just wait. When the system is observed (measured), it collapses down into one (and only one) of these quantum states. Which state it will collapse into varies with time and is always changing. So ponder that one: the quantum system exists in multiple realties at once, and does not commit to one reality until you ask it to. And which one it commits to depends on when you ask it.

3. Quantum Entanglement. This may well be the strangest and most thrilling result of quantum theory. It is possible to construct a system of two atoms in an "entangled" state in which the properties of the atoms are shared and locked together. This has been demonstrated many times. Whatever one atom does, the other one exactly mimics it and vice versa. Ok, strange enough, but now consider that separating the atoms does not break this entanglement - it knows no bounds - these atoms could be on opposite sides of the universe and the entanglement would remain solid. This behavior is unexplainable except through quantum theory, which predicts it. Lest you think this is all academic, the practical implications of entanglement are huge. It has already been used in quantum communications systems (as you can imagine...what one does, the other copies...) and a world of truly powerful quantum computer systems that take advantage of entanglement is just on the horizon.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Photo: "A representative radial wave function of two electrons scattered in the collision of an electron with a hydrogen atom."

Lying Down on the Job

2012-01-18T10:28:00.001-05:00

This Italian Carnival cruise ship incident does not fill me with confidence…in fact it smacks of Titanic, although on a much smaller scale.

While I can understand a ship hitting an iceberg in 1912 at night, I think 100 years later, given GPS and advanced radar, no ship has any excuse to go off course or hit any stationary object. Sorry. That’s just stupidity, or gross negligence, or perhaps both.

The poor performance of the captain, who abandoned the ship and had to be ordered back, the late evacuation order, complete chaos, nobody speaking the same language, it all adds up to the fact that we’ve not come very far in the last 100 years with respect to safety.

Modern ships have enough life boats for all the passengers, but that only helps if you use them.

They got lucky here, this could have been much, much worse.

IPv6 Day, 6/6/12

2012-01-18T09:47:00.001-05:00

"When Vint Cerf and his friends at DARPA concocted a system that allowed for 4.3 billion IP addresses, it was never conceived that everyone's computer would be able to access the internet -- before the age when your telephone, fridge and air conditioning unit would too. The IPv4 system officially ran out of addresses last year, but fortunately the moment was prepared for: June 8th 2011 was "World IPv6 Day," where a host of sites including Google, Bing and Facebook quietly tried out the new system for 24 hours to make sure it wouldn't cause the internet to explode. June 6th this year will see the final activation of the new network provision that has a capacity of around 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 unique addresses, which we figure will keep us going until Black Friday, at least."

Around The World

2012-01-18T09:43:00.001-05:00

Lisa Bettany, Canadian pro photographer and developer of the iPhone app Camera+, is traveling around the world with nothing but an iPhone camera (ok, two, in case one is lost or damaged), and documenting her trip on the site: http://mostlylisa.com/worldtrip/ and in her first travel book.

The new iPhone 4s camera is pretty amazing for such a small device, as you can see by looking at her photos. Her edits are all done in Camera+.

And so explodes the emerging field of iPhoneography, proving yet again that the best camera is the one you have with you.

Famous Photos, Colorized

2012-01-18T09:16:00.001-05:00

I’m usually very much against colorizing, especially old movies, but these photos are very well done and the color seems to make them more real.

Going Dark

2012-01-18T07:43:00.001-05:00

In case you haven’t heard, there are two “anti-piracy“ bills (SOPA and PIPA) working their way through congress right now that are not going over well with people who like the internet. The reason I put “anti-piracy” in quotes is because these bills are really not about piracy so much as they are about control of the open internet. Embedded in these bills are provisions that would basically ruin internet security and openness, and put everyone who links or allows links on a site in danger of prosecution. I won’t go into them but if you’d like to learn all about it, just visit Wikipedia today. They have joined the Blackout along with many other internet sites, in protest to these dreadful bills.

“SOPA and PIPA put the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites. Small sites won't have sufficient resources to defend themselves. Big media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for their foreign competitors, even if copyright isn't being infringed. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines. SOPA and PIPA build a framework for future restrictions and suppression.

In a world in which politicians regulate the Internet based on the influence of big money, Wikipedia — and sites like it — cannot survive.

Congress says it's trying to protect the rights of copyright owners, but the "cure" that SOPA and PIPA represent is worse than the disease. SOPA and PIPA are not the answer: they will fatally damage the free and open Internet."

The president has come out roundly against them as well, and promised a veto:

"Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small. Across the globe, the openness of the Internet is increasingly central to innovation in business, government, and society and it must be protected. To minimize this risk, new legislation must be narrowly targeted only at sites beyond the reach of current U.S. law, cover activity clearly prohibited under existing U.S. laws, and be effectively tailored, with strong due process and focused on criminal activity. Any provision covering Internet intermediaries such as online advertising networks, payment processors, or search engines must be transparent and designed to prevent overly broad private rights of action that could encourage unjustified litigation that could discourage startup businesses and innovative firms from growing."

Soon

2012-01-17T21:17:00.001-05:00

Oh No!

2012-01-17T13:59:00.001-05:00

“US Bans the importation of exotic snakes and their eggs”

Now how am I going to make my Banded Krait omelets?

The Fam

2012-01-17T13:52:00.003-05:00

Muscle Man Z

2012-01-17T13:52:00.001-05:00

More Zoo Fun

2012-01-17T13:51:00.004-05:00

Alien Sun

2012-01-17T13:51:00.003-05:00

Green Bird, taken by Zach

2012-01-17T13:51:00.001-05:00

Homemade Pasta & Pesto with Chicken

2012-01-17T13:50:00.001-05:00

Sign/Times

2012-01-17T13:36:00.001-05:00

In the middle of last century, Sears had 350,000 employees.

In 2009, the Sears Tower in Chicago was renamed Willis Tower because Sears no longer has any employees working there.

A Dozen Atoms

2012-01-13T08:42:00.001-05:00

IBM announced that after five years of work, its researchers have been able to reduce from about one million to 12 the number of atoms required to create a bit of data.

So true

2012-01-12T19:47:00.000-05:00

Packard Plant in Transformers 3...note fake skyline

2012-01-12T11:37:00.001-05:00

Meadow Brook Hall in Transformers 3...I have shot wedding pictures there!

2012-01-12T11:36:00.000-05:00

Mogra Man!

2012-01-12T11:35:00.001-05:00

Look at my old computer workstation!

2012-01-12T11:29:00.001-05:00

Not so long ago...

2012-01-12T11:27:00.001-05:00

The World's Smallest Vertebrate...

2012-01-12T07:49:00.001-05:00

Disturbing travel thought for the day...

2012-01-11T14:01:00.001-05:00

"Unlike the sheets, hotels and motels do not change or launder the bedspreads on a daily basis. It's actually more of an annual thing. And if you don't think there are various bodily fluids lingering in those coverings, let us remind you that when the bedspread from an internationally ranked five-star hotel was introduced as evidence in boxer Mike Tyson's rape trial, investigators found it coated with the DNA of so many different men that it took some significant time to finally isolate traces of Tyson's contribution."

...sleep well!

Overheard #6,936

2012-01-10T14:29:00.001-05:00

Two guys talking about back pain medication dosing:

“You’re way at the low end, baby aspirin territory. It’s not like you’re gonna cook your liver…just don’t drive too much on it.”

Five Years Ago Yesterday

2012-01-10T09:26:00.001-05:00

"Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. One is very fortunate if you get to work on just one of these in your career. Apple has been very fortunate that it's been able to introduce a few of these into the world. In 1984 we introduced the Macintosh. It didn't just change Apple, it changed the whole industry. In 2001 we introduced the first iPod, and it didn't just change the way we all listened to music, it changed the entire music industry.”

"Well today, we're introducing three revolutionary new products! The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls”

(applause)

"The second is a revolutionary new mobile phone”

(huge applause)

"And the third is a breakthrough internet communications device”

(sporadic applause as the audience started to wonder about what this third device could be)

"So, three things"

Jobs repeated these three things over and over while the slideshow switched between an iPod icon, a Phone icon, and the Safari browser icon.

"Are you getting it?" Jobs asked.

(silence)

"These are not three separate devices! This is one device. And we are calling it iPhone. Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. Here it is."

And reinvent the phone they did.

Probably the best product introduction in electronics history, or even in the history of products. That “Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices” was genius, I remember when I saw the recording of the keynote, that delivery sent a chill down my spine.

Geo

2012-01-09T20:33:00.003-05:00

Pick me up

2012-01-09T20:33:00.001-05:00

Winter Sky

2012-01-09T20:32:00.001-05:00

From the mind of Z

2012-01-09T20:31:00.001-05:00

1/9: Tapestry

2012-01-09T20:19:00.001-05:00

The Dodge Dart is back...

2012-01-09T13:17:00.001-05:00

The Jewel

2012-01-06T14:06:00.001-05:00

Incredible portrait of Saturn taken by the Cassini spacecraft last month. It was filtered in near-infrared to bring out cloud patterns and as you can see it’s aligned looking directly at the rings, taken during a ring-plane crossing.

That small speck right under the rings is the moon Tethys.

Changyu Cabernet d Est

2012-01-06T09:30:00.001-05:00

China is about to become the world’s largest wine producer. An interesting development that might scare the crap out of places like Chile and Australia, but probably should scare all the wine producers because China is going to be making some really great wine, really cheap. Really soon.

I want a Chewbacca hoodie!

2012-01-05T21:49:00.001-05:00

Brooke: "Is that a good way to walk on a rhinoceros?"

2012-01-05T10:11:00.001-05:00

Project 365 1/5: The best Christmas ever

2012-01-05T09:06:00.000-05:00

Project 365 1/4: Smiling Ballerina

2012-01-05T08:56:00.003-05:00

Project 365 1/3: "Go Maddie, Go!"

2012-01-05T08:56:00.001-05:00

Project 365 1/2: First Run

2012-01-05T08:55:00.003-05:00

Project 365 1/1: First sunrise of 2012

2012-01-05T08:55:00.001-05:00

Zip!

2012-01-04T13:10:00.001-05:00

Cool map of the USA, wherein all the zip codes are connected via lines to the next consecutive number. So, 48334 is connected to both 48333 and 48335.

As you can see, the Zip code system was a very well designed way to break the country up into diminishing chunks and in fact it behaves mathematically as a fractal system with dimension 1.78.

Microsoft observes the official death of IE6 with a tee shirt...

2012-01-04T11:26:00.000-05:00

365

2012-01-04T11:11:00.001-05:00

My Sister-in Law Mary is doing a “Project 365” this year, taking one picture each day, and she suggested I try it too. Which is a great idea, and I think I’ve got at least one pic from the already expired days of 2012 so I’m off to a good start!

There are lots of ways to do this, I want to concentrate on taking a photo of something that intersects my life in some way or catches my attention during that day. The 2012 first sunrise photo will be my official 1/1 shot.

I’m sure a great many of my photos will be taken on the iPhone since it’s always with me, but the gear matters not.

It will be fun to see where this goes…

The Path

2012-01-03T14:23:00.001-05:00

"Facebook and Twitter and even Instagram can be so cluttered that finding those moments of intimacy requires hunting. Worse, all are so very brand-heavy now. All of them have been inundated by enterprises that desperately want our attention; that want to pull us away from the network itself to read a story, or watch a video, or look at an image, or play a game. They don't want us here, they want us there."

Yeah, the world needs another social network like it needs another hole in the head. And while I like the Google+ design for the most part, Facebook almost immediately stole many of the good ideas from it (not implemented as well IMO). And the fact is, Facebook has the inertia, like VHS over Beta, and most of the time that’s all you need to win.

But let me say that there is a new one out there…well, fall of last year, but it just got a huge interface redesign, that blows all of them away. Seriously, it’s that good.

It’s called Path, and I’m quite sure it won’t catch on because as I said I think Facebook has the market wrapped up. At least for now. But if people really cared about exceptional beauty in both function and design, Path would take over tomorrow.

Imagine Facebook. Now remove all the crap. All of it: Farmville, third-party apps, and Ads. Remove page updates from the rock bands you liked in college and from political organizations.

Now jettison most of your friends, you can keep your BFFs, up to 150 of them. That’s all. Let’s face it. If you know more than 150 people in real life, you don’t know them very well.

Now add a few things, borrowed from other social networks, the best features out there:

Add the great photo snapping, editing, and sharing properties of Instagram. Add the real-time aspect of Twitter…everything you do is projected to your friends immediately and everything auto updates. If you so allow, your location will update automatically as you move around. That may sound like a security nightmare but it isn’t because Path is different.

Now wrap it, mobile-only, in the best user interface design yet seen in a social app. This interface is so buttery smooth, so soft and quiet and animated, that it takes only one glance to know this is how things should be done. It has personality, but gets out of your way.

Now add a cool photo of yourself at the top and you’re good to go.

Path operates on the principle of, oddly enough, the “path”, where each user has a path. That new timeline feature of Facebook? Yeah, like that but without the clutter…which is why it’s cool because on Path, a person’s path is like a view of their life.

The 150 friend limit of Path is paramount. Because you can only friend people you really know, and because Path’s security settings are easy and rock solid, you are much safer sharing more of your life. And when someone visits your “path”, Path does the smart thing and posts that event to your path too. Instead of a complex security structure that makes you set individual privacy ratings for who can view what, Path just tells you who actually did view your path.

The little design touches pop out all over: you tell it when you are going to sleep and it won’t bother you with updates…and your friends see that you are sleeping too. Instead of “likes”, you get emoticons.

I am not doing this justice, and as I said, I highly doubt Path will supplant Facebook anytime soon.

I just think that if the universe was fair, it would.

Maybe this guy explains it better:

"You fire it up, and see nothing but core updates from the people you care about. Photos, the songs they're listening to, the places they are. As you scroll through a timeline, you can stop and blow up each person's moment, or update, full screen. You can comment on it, or leave a little emoticon (including a frown, which frees you up from having to "like" bad news) in lieu of a comment.

You can also go into someone's Path—which is a lot like a Facebook timeline, but without all the third-party junk and ads. There's a real-time aspect to it, fostered by ambient awareness and subtle animations—like the way it automatically posts your location when you move from one place to another, or the ticking of seconds after you post an update, or the way friends' comments appear the instant they are posted. Everything is embedded in the app itself. Nothing takes you away, off-site. And it's all (for now at least) deeply personal. There tend to be no messages and no agendas. Scrolling through Path feels like diving into someone's life.

...

Path isn't cluttered with self-promotional links or YouTube videos of sneezing cats. You're not going to see plug in games...you're not going to see the glurge and hurge of illiterate rage and hash tag garbage..there's no call to re-post this as your status..no obnoxious comments from your hyper-political third-cousin twice removed. There's no tiresome, turgid competition for the best status updates as one-liners, or increasingly drunken series of 25 photos from last night's party...

In its place is private conversation. A few photos. Maybe a video. A location. A very small look at your friends' lives. A glimpse into the things they aren't sharing elsewhere. It is purely personal. And the thing is, I never realized that I needed that. But I do."

If you want to try it, friend me....um, if I know you that is :)

First run

2012-01-02T22:30:00.001-05:00

Maddie "telling on" a boy at school…

2012-01-02T11:22:00.001-05:00

"He put up his middle finger without even his other fingers"

I Remember

2012-01-02T10:31:00.001-05:00

"I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees. The trail is strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets. It has given me blessed release from care and worry, and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful. Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and benumbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail. And when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me. I am happy." Hamlin Garland, 1899

Spongebob on the Brain

2012-01-02T10:16:00.000-05:00

The other night Heather was getting Brooke to sleep while the rest of us were watching a movie. Brooke heard a noise from the movie and asked Heather what it was. Heather said it was our movie and Brooke asked:

"Was it a lot of guys killing Squidward?"

The Doctor Horsey Place

2011-12-27T09:46:00.000-05:00

Tree

2011-12-26T22:04:00.001-05:00

Concentration

2011-12-26T22:03:00.003-05:00

Cutie

2011-12-26T22:03:00.001-05:00

Stocking from the black lagoon

2011-12-26T22:02:00.001-05:00

Sword

2011-12-26T22:01:00.002-05:00

Zoofun

2011-12-26T22:01:00.001-05:00

Various holiday treats

2011-12-26T21:58:00.001-05:00

Christmas Cookies!

2011-12-24T16:38:00.001-05:00

Why I now use iBank...

2011-12-22T14:24:00.001-05:00

From Daring Fireball:

Aaron Forth, Intuit: “As you may know, Quicken for Mac 2007 does not currently work on Apple’s latest operating system, Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion). I understand the frustration this may have caused you and have put a team in place to address this issue. I am happy to announce that we will have a solution that makes Quicken 2007 for Mac “Lion-compatible” by early spring.”

You know your app has fallen behind when you’re making promises about a version whose model year was five years ago.

Colliding

2011-12-22T13:59:00.003-05:00

The size and complexity of this great machine I have written about, the LHC, still boggles my mind. Most of the world was unaware of this machine before it went live in 2008, and then only because the only "news" broadcast about it had to do with the prediction of a few misguided freaks that it would destroy the world when they started it up. Seriously, I kid you not.

Well, we're all still here (and incidentally, we'll all be here in 2013 as well, pay no attention to that Mayan calendar myth), and the LHC has made great progress in its mission. It's working, and it's making discoveries.

To hear about the LHC and its discoveries is interesting, but I think many people don't yet know just how incredibly complicated this machine is, and how much human ingenuity it required to design and build. After all, it's looking for the most elusive creatures in the universe...

So what the heck is this thing, and why can't Dave stop writing about it?

The Large Hadron Collider is, at its most basic, a huge ring tunnel, some 17 miles in circumference, buried 500 feet underground on the French-Swiss border near Geneva. It was designed and built, and is run by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) based in Geneva. The primary purpose of the LHC is to discover particles supporting the Standard Model of physics, and in that way it was made to answer the most fundamental questions about the building blocks of our universe.

I've said that the LHC was really designed to find one particle and that is the Higgs Boson. That's not entirely true. The Higgs is the big prize, but there are other particles to be found after that, outside the Standard Model. There are inconsistencies in the Standard Model (that neither you nor I could ever understand, trust me) that nonetheless hint that it may need to be slightly revised and that revision may come in the form of a complimentary theory called Supersymmetry. This new theory could patch up the holes in the Standard Model but in order to confirm it, the new particles IT predicts must be found. Put that up on the shelf for later, for now it's all about the Higgs.

The Standard Model of physics predicts the existence of the Higgs, but it has never been seen. As I blogged earlier, the LHC may be on the verge of finding it. According to most high-energy physicists, the Higgs should be visible at well below the energies the LHC can generate.

What is this strange Higgs Boson anyhow? Well, firstly know that subatomic particles are mind-boggling in the extreme, they behave by rules that seem alien to us up here in the "big world", rules described by something called Quantum Mechanics. Elementary particles, the building blocks of atoms, behave in odd ways, and they have equally odd names. Here's a chart of the particles of the standard model. All but the Higgs have been found in previous colliders.

Ok, I warned you: this is going to sound weird:

The particles come in different "flavors" based on their quantum numbers: Isospin, Charm, Strangeness, Topness, and Bottomness. There are four basic types of subatomic particle: Quarks, Leptons, Fermions (named after Enrico Fermi), and Bosons (named after physicist Satyendra Nath Bose). They are differentiated by their mass, charge, and spin. A Boson is a particle with integer spin (ie, 1). The Standard Model predicts that the emission and absorption of Bosons causes the "weak nuclear force", one of the four known forces of nature (the others being gravity, electromagnetic, and the strong nuclear).

The Higgs Boson is the missing link here, its interaction with the other Bosons is thought to explain how electroweak symmetry breaks down (the Higgs Mechanism) which leads (assuming you have a brain the size of a medicine ball) to an explanation of why other elementary particles have mass. The secret of mass and gravity lies somewhere tangled up in these Bosons.

The interactions of matter on this level are crazy in the extreme. For instance, the Pauli Exclusion Principle states that no two Fermions may occupy the same Quantum State simultaneously. And to make things really difficult, Quantum Mechanics states that the act of observing something at this level changes the reality of the interactions. Yeah, I didn't make that up...go read about it. Quantum Mechanics will blow your mind like nothing else you will ever read about. The math is solid, but finding confirmation is extremely difficult and requires scientists to go to extreme lengths...like building colliders that use the power of a city and cost billions of dollars. Nevertheless, we know Quantum Mechanics works, because its principles are exploited in products such as flash memory (as the circuits in computer chips become smaller, they begin to bump into the quantum world where the rules change and electrons start behaving very differently - at that level you may as well throw common sense out the window).

I'm not going to bother writing more about these particles because A) I'm in way over my head despite 25+ years of trying to understand it (and I've read entire books on it) and B) I want to have at least one or two of you stay till the end of this crazy post (I'm sure my sister has already bailed...I fully expect a "TOO LONG" comment to be left).

Suffice it to say, the Higgs Boson is very tricky and shy, and whatever it is, it requires enormous amounts of energy to agree to show itself in public.

That's where the LHC comes in. It is, by far, the largest science experiment ever constructed. It's a huge superconducting tunnel designed to accelerate proton beams around the main ring up to near the speed of light, while simultaneously accelerating another beam in the opposite direction. Once the beams are at full kinetic energy, they are channeled into a special chamber and collided together. The resulting collision breaks apart the protons and reveals their building blocks - these subatomic particles mentioned above. So, how do you capture this data? It isn't easy.

There are two main particle detectors in the LHC. Both of them are awe-inspiring. It is not a stretch to say that the detectors in the LHC are the most complicated electronic machines ever designed and built by humans. More than three thousand scientists and engineers from 165 scientific institutes in 38 countries designed and operate them. The instruments defy ordinary comprehension. These detectors are responsible for capturing the proton collisions and resulting particle trails and so they have to be incredibly sensitive. And that means complicated and expensive.

The first detector is called the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), although compact is definitely the wrong choice of wording here. Its two end caps (which look like flying saucers) are as big as five story buildings, and each weigh more than 3,000 tons. They contain millions of hair-like sensing wires and the CMS has more than 300,000 channels of superfast electronic sensors to capture the collision events. The CMS is actually located in France, as the LHC is spread across the border with Switzerland.

The other main detector is called ATLAS, a toroidal tube about 120 feet long that weighs in at 7,000 tons and is designed to capture new particle types across a wide range of energies. Its eight superconducting magnets (seen below) are powerful enough to crush a bus.

The decision on which detector to use (there are also four other smaller ones) is up to the scientists performing a given experiment and depends on what type of particle they're expecting to see.

Even with all this technology, capturing a collision is a rare thing. One physicist said getting a successful collision in a collider is like shooting two guns towards each other from opposite sides of Texas and hoping the bullets collide in the middle. So the LHC throws very large numbers of protons together to increase the odds.

Well, the LHC seems to be accumulating collisions at a much higher rate than previous colliders and I can't wait to see what it finds. Just yesterday in fact (and still unconfirmed) the ATLAS detector found a particle called Chi-b 3P, which is comprised of a "Beauty" quark and a "Beauty" anti-quark, bound together with the strong nuclear force...this particle was believed to exist in nature but never seen until now. In case you actually looked at that chart above and are wondering, a "Beauty" quark is another name for a "Bottom" quark...because it wasn't complicated enough already, we have to add some nicknames into the mix.

I'm really sorry this turned out so complicated. I hope I got it mostly right. This is just scratching the surface, the great people who discovered and continue to discover these elementary particles are true pioneers in a world both strange and wonderful.

Here's an image from the LHC taken this year that depicts a perfect collision captured by the CMS. Unlike past instruments, the CMS and ATLAS images are three-dimensional and color coded. In this image the red lines are the paths of the colliding proton beams. The yellow lines are the trails of all the particles as they broke apart from the colliding protons. The blue volume is the crystal barrel of the CMS, where the collisions take place. If this image isn't beautiful, I don't know what is.

Journey

2011-12-22T10:44:00.001-05:00

I often write about scientific findings in my blog. This is a blog about my life, and science is a big part of my life. I can’t help but write about things I’m interested in.

When I write posts I often dream (maybe naively so) that someone will read this blog years or decades from now, after I’m gone. Perhaps my kids. And I like putting steaks in the ground, little mini time capsules that can be looked at and compared with future discoveries.

My sincerest hope is that if someone does read this many years from now, all of the science in here appears very dated and primitive.

That will mean we humans have continued our great scientific journey in the meantime.

Maddie's private dance lesson...nobody else showed up!

2011-12-21T17:10:00.001-05:00