DNA Is Dynamic and Has High Energy; Not Stiff Or Static As First Envisioned
ScienceDaily (July 14, 2009) — The interaction represented produced the famous explanation of the structure of DNA, but the model pictured is a stiff snapshot of idealized DNA. As researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Houston note in a report that appears online in the journal Nucleic Acids Research, DNA is not a stiff or static. It is dynamic with high energy. It exists naturally in a slightly underwound state and its status changes in waves generated by normal cell functions such as DNA replication, transcription, repair and recombination.
DNA is also accompanied by a cloud of counterions (charged particles that neutralize the genetic material's very negative charge) and, of course, the protein macromolecules that affect DNA activity.
"Many models and experiments have been interpreted with the static model," said Dr. Lynn Zechiedrich, associate professor of molecular virology and microbiology at BCM and a senior author of the report. "But this model does not allow for the fact that DNA in real life is transiently underwound and overwound in its natural state."
DNA appears a perfect spring that can be stretched and then spring back to its original conformation. How far can you stretch it before something happens to the structure and it cannot bounce back? What happens when it is exposed to normal cellular stresses involved in doing its job? That was the problem that Zechiedrich and her colleagues tackled.
Their results also addresses a question posed by another Nobel laureate, the late Dr. Linus Pauling, who asked how the information encoded by the bases could be read if it is sequestered inside the DNA molecular with phosphate molecules on the outside.
It's easy to explain when the cell divides because the double-stranded DNA also divides at the behest of a special enzyme, making its genetic code readily readable.
"Many cellular activities, however, do not involve the separation of the two strands of DNA," said Zechiedrich.
To unravel the problem, former graduate student, Dr. Graham L. Randall, mentored jointly by Zechiedrich and Dr. B. Montgomery Pettitt of UH, simulated 19 independent DNA systems with fixed degrees of underwinding or overwinding, using a special computer analysis started by Petttitt.
They found that when DNA is underwound in the same manner that you might underwind a spring, the forces induce one of two bases – adenine or thymine – to "flip out" of the sequence, thus relieving the stress that the molecule experiences.
"It always happens in the underwound state," said Zechiedrich. "We wanted to know if torsional stress was the force that accounted for the base flipping that others have seen occur, but for which we had no idea where the energy was supplied to do this very big job."
When the base flips out, it relieves the stress on the DNA, which then relaxes the rest of the DNA not involved in the base flipping back to its "perfect spring" state.
When the molecule is overwound, it assumes a "Pauling-like DNA" state in which the DNA turns itself inside out to expose the bases -- much in the way Pauling had predicted.
Zechiedrich and her colleagues theorize that the base flipping, denaturation, and Pauling-like DNA caused by under- and overwinding allows DNA to interact with proteins during processes such as replication, transcription and recombination and allows the code to be read. And back to the idea of the "perfect spring" behavior of the DNA helix - "This notion is entirely wrong," said Zechiedrich. "Underwinding is not equal and opposite to overwinding, as predicted, not by a long shot, that's really a cool result that Graham got."
Support for this work came from the Robert A. Welch Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Keck Center for Interdisciplinary Bioscience Training of the Gulf Coast Consortia. The computations were performed in part using the Teragrid and the Molecular Science Computing 85 Facility in the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Biological and Environmental Research and located at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
My Comment: Slowly, tiny step after tiny step, is Western Science getting closer to ‘discovering’ what the ancient cultures have long known, that a Life Force or Chi exists?
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Hard Wired for Life
Brain Innately Separates Living And Non-living Objects For Processing
ScienceDaily (Aug. 14, 2009) — For unknown reasons, the human brain distinctly separates the handling of images of living things from images of non-living things, processing each image type in a different area of the brain. For years, many scientists have assumed the brain segregated visual information in this manner to optimize processing the images themselves, but new research shows that even in people who have been blind since birth the brain still separates the concepts of living and non-living objects.
The research, published in the Cell Press journal Neuron, implies that the brain categorizes objects based on the different types of subsequent consideration they demand—such as whether an object is edible, or is a landmark on the way home, or is a predator to run from. They are not categorized entirely by their appearance.
"If both sighted people and people with blindness process the same ideas in the same parts of the brain, then it follows that visual experience is not necessary in order for those aspects of brain organization to develop," says Bradford Mahon, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester, and lead author of the study. "We think this means significant parts of the brain are innately structured around a few domains of knowledge that were critical in humans' evolutionary history."
Previous studies have shown that the sight of certain objects, such as a table or mountain, activate regions of the brain other than does the sight of living objects, such as an animal or face—but why the brain would choose to process these two categories differently has remained a mystery, says Mahon. Since the regions were known to activate when the objects were seen, scientists wondered if something about the visual appearance of the objects determined how the brain would process them. For instance, says Mahon, most living things have curved forms, and so many scientists thought the brain prefers to processes images of living things in an area that is optimized for curved forms.
To see if the appearance of objects is indeed key to how the brain conducts its processing, Mahon and his team, led by Alfonso Caramazza, director of the Cognitive Neuropsychology Laboratory at Harvard University, asked people who have been blind since birth to think about certain living and non-living objects. These people had no visual experience at all, so their brains necessarily determined where to do the processing using some criteria other than an object's appearance.
"When we looked at the MRI scans, it was pretty clear that blind people and sighted people were dividing up living and non-living processing in the same way," says Mahon. "We think these findings strongly encourage the view that the human brain's organization innately anticipates the different types of computations that must be carried out for different types of objects."
Mahon thinks it's possible that other parts of the human brain are innately structured around categories of knowledge that may have been important in human evolution. For instance, he says, facial expressions need a specific kind of processing linked to understanding emotions, whereas a landmark needs to be processed in conjunction with a sense of spatial awareness. The brain might choose to process these things in different areas of the brain because those areas have strong connections to other processing centers specializing in emotion or spatial awareness, says Mahon.
Mahon is now working on new experiments designed to further our understanding of how the brain represents knowledge of different classes of objects, both in sighted and blind individuals, as well as in stroke patients.
The data for the study were collected at the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences at the University of Trento in Italy.
My Comment: Here is another area of agreement between the latest discoveries within science and our ancient teachings. Somewhere inside of us, in the case of the article, within the brain, and for Jews, not just the brain but more, we are hard wired for things. I say ‘things’ in a vague way because in both science and within us, we may be aware of being hard wired but we aren’t terribly aware of what we are wired for. Nor are we aware of what the wiring is. There is a disconnect between this wiring and our conscious awareness. In the Torah the joke is on us—because Gd essentially spells out the hard wire schemata, but our awareness is in such shambles that we can’t see it, or we misinterpret it, even though we read it every year. The Torah makes a clear connection between choosing life AND good over death AND evil. And you see how easily civilization botches the understanding of this simple statement. The good news is that we have the understanding within us, the difficult part is healing the chasm. And this is life.
ScienceDaily (Aug. 14, 2009) — For unknown reasons, the human brain distinctly separates the handling of images of living things from images of non-living things, processing each image type in a different area of the brain. For years, many scientists have assumed the brain segregated visual information in this manner to optimize processing the images themselves, but new research shows that even in people who have been blind since birth the brain still separates the concepts of living and non-living objects.
The research, published in the Cell Press journal Neuron, implies that the brain categorizes objects based on the different types of subsequent consideration they demand—such as whether an object is edible, or is a landmark on the way home, or is a predator to run from. They are not categorized entirely by their appearance.
"If both sighted people and people with blindness process the same ideas in the same parts of the brain, then it follows that visual experience is not necessary in order for those aspects of brain organization to develop," says Bradford Mahon, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester, and lead author of the study. "We think this means significant parts of the brain are innately structured around a few domains of knowledge that were critical in humans' evolutionary history."
Previous studies have shown that the sight of certain objects, such as a table or mountain, activate regions of the brain other than does the sight of living objects, such as an animal or face—but why the brain would choose to process these two categories differently has remained a mystery, says Mahon. Since the regions were known to activate when the objects were seen, scientists wondered if something about the visual appearance of the objects determined how the brain would process them. For instance, says Mahon, most living things have curved forms, and so many scientists thought the brain prefers to processes images of living things in an area that is optimized for curved forms.
To see if the appearance of objects is indeed key to how the brain conducts its processing, Mahon and his team, led by Alfonso Caramazza, director of the Cognitive Neuropsychology Laboratory at Harvard University, asked people who have been blind since birth to think about certain living and non-living objects. These people had no visual experience at all, so their brains necessarily determined where to do the processing using some criteria other than an object's appearance.
"When we looked at the MRI scans, it was pretty clear that blind people and sighted people were dividing up living and non-living processing in the same way," says Mahon. "We think these findings strongly encourage the view that the human brain's organization innately anticipates the different types of computations that must be carried out for different types of objects."
Mahon thinks it's possible that other parts of the human brain are innately structured around categories of knowledge that may have been important in human evolution. For instance, he says, facial expressions need a specific kind of processing linked to understanding emotions, whereas a landmark needs to be processed in conjunction with a sense of spatial awareness. The brain might choose to process these things in different areas of the brain because those areas have strong connections to other processing centers specializing in emotion or spatial awareness, says Mahon.
Mahon is now working on new experiments designed to further our understanding of how the brain represents knowledge of different classes of objects, both in sighted and blind individuals, as well as in stroke patients.
The data for the study were collected at the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences at the University of Trento in Italy.
My Comment: Here is another area of agreement between the latest discoveries within science and our ancient teachings. Somewhere inside of us, in the case of the article, within the brain, and for Jews, not just the brain but more, we are hard wired for things. I say ‘things’ in a vague way because in both science and within us, we may be aware of being hard wired but we aren’t terribly aware of what we are wired for. Nor are we aware of what the wiring is. There is a disconnect between this wiring and our conscious awareness. In the Torah the joke is on us—because Gd essentially spells out the hard wire schemata, but our awareness is in such shambles that we can’t see it, or we misinterpret it, even though we read it every year. The Torah makes a clear connection between choosing life AND good over death AND evil. And you see how easily civilization botches the understanding of this simple statement. The good news is that we have the understanding within us, the difficult part is healing the chasm. And this is life.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Anomalies and Miracles
13 Bits of Science that Do Not Make Sense
1 The placebo effect
Don't try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.
This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.
So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.
Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's disease. He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients' brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson's symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer "bursts" of firing - another feature associated with Parkinson's. The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something.
We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body's biochemistry. "The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction," he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don't know.
2 The horizon problem
Our universe appears to be unfathomably uniform. Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other, and you'll see that the microwave background radiation filling the cosmos is at the same temperature everywhere. That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old.
Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have traveled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.
This "horizon problem" is a big headache for cosmologists, so big that they have come up with some pretty wild solutions. "Inflation", for example.
You can solve the horizon problem by having the universe expand ultra-fast for a time, just after the big bang, blowing up by a factor of 1050 in 10-33 seconds. But is that just wishful thinking? "Inflation would be an explanation if it occurred," says University of Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees. The trouble is that no one knows what could have made that happen – but see Inside inflation: after the big bang.
So, in effect, inflation solves one mystery only to invoke another. A variation in the speed of light could also solve the horizon problem - but this too is impotent in the face of the question "why?" In scientific terms, the uniform temperature of the background radiation remains an anomaly.
A variation in the speed of light could solve the problem, but this too is impotent in the face of the question 'why?'
3 Ultra-energetic cosmic rays
For more than a decade, physicists in Japan have been seeing cosmic rays that should not exist. Cosmic rays are particles - mostly protons but sometimes heavy atomic nuclei - that travel through the universe at close to the speed of light. Some cosmic rays detected on Earth are produced in violent events such as supernovae, but we still don't know the origins of the highest-energy particles, which are the most energetic particles ever seen in nature. But that's not the real mystery.
As cosmic-ray particles travel through space, they lose energy in collisions with the low-energy photons that pervade the universe, such as those of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Einstein's special theory of relativity dictates that any cosmic rays reaching Earth from a source outside our galaxy will have suffered so many energy-shedding collisions that their maximum possible energy is 5 × 1019 electronvolts. This is known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit.
Over the past decade, however, the University of Tokyo's Akeno Giant Air Shower Array - 111 particle detectors spread out over 100 square kilometres - has detected several cosmic rays above the GZK limit. In theory, they can only have come from within our galaxy, avoiding an energy-sapping journey across the cosmos. However, astronomers can find no source for these cosmic rays in our galaxy. So what is going on?
One possibility is that there is something wrong with the Akeno results. Another is that Einstein was wrong. His special theory of relativity says that space is the same in all directions, but what if particles found it easier to move in certain directions? Then the cosmic rays could retain more of their energy, allowing them to beat the GZK limit.
Physicists at the Pierre Auger experiment in Mendoza, Argentina, are now working on this problem. Using 1600 detectors spread over 3000 square kilometres, Auger should be able to determine the energies of incoming cosmic rays and shed more light on the Akeno results.
Alan Watson, an astronomer at the University of Leeds, UK, and spokesman for the Pierre Auger project, is already convinced there is something worth following up here. "I have no doubts that events above 1020 electronvolts exist. There are sufficient examples to convince me," he says. The question now is, what are they? How many of these particles are coming in, and what direction are they coming from? Until we get that information, there's no telling how exotic the true explanation could be.
Update: Follow the latest hunt for GZK neutrinos.
4 Belfast homeopathy results
Madeline Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.
In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.
So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.
You can understand why Ennis remains skeptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.
5 Dark matter
Take our best understanding of gravity, apply it to the way galaxies spin, and you'll quickly see the problem: the galaxies should be falling apart. Galactic matter orbits around a central point because its mutual gravitational attraction creates centripetal forces. But there is not enough mass in the galaxies to produce the observed spin.
Vera Rubin, an astronomer working at the Carnegie Institution's department of terrestrial magnetism in Washington DC, spotted this anomaly in the late 1970s. The best response from physicists was to suggest there is more stuff out there than we can see. The trouble was, nobody could explain what this "dark matter" was.
And they still can't. Although researchers have made many suggestions about what kind of particles might make up dark matter, there is no consensus. It's an embarrassing hole in our understanding. Astronomical observations suggest that dark matter must make up about 90 per cent of the mass in the universe, yet we are astonishingly ignorant what that 90 per cent is.
Maybe we can't work out what dark matter is because it doesn't actually exist. That's certainly the way Rubin would like it to turn out. "If I could have my pick, I would like to learn that Newton's laws must be modified in order to correctly describe gravitational interactions at large distances," she says. "That's more appealing than a universe filled with a new kind of sub-nuclear particle."
Update: Some scientists are trying to create the stuff themselves. See Let there be dark matter.
If the results turn out to be real, the implications are profound. We may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.
6 Viking's methane
July 20, 1976. Gilbert Levin is on the edge of his seat. Millions of kilometres away on Mars, the Viking landers have scooped up some soil and mixed it with carbon-14-labelled nutrients. The mission's scientists have all agreed that if Levin's instruments on board the landers detect emissions of carbon-14-containing methane from the soil, then there must be life on Mars.
Viking reports a positive result. Something is ingesting the nutrients, metabolising them, and then belching out gas laced with carbon-14.
So why no party?
Because another instrument, designed to identify organic molecules considered essential signs of life, found nothing. Almost all the mission scientists erred on the side of caution and declared Viking's discovery a false positive. But was it?
The arguments continue to rage, but results from NASA's latest rovers show that the surface of Mars was almost certainly wet in the past and therefore hospitable to life. And there is plenty more evidence where that came from, Levin says. "Every mission to Mars has produced evidence supporting my conclusion. None has contradicted it."
Levin stands by his claim, and he is no longer alone. Joe Miller, a cell biologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has re-analysed the data and he thinks that the emissions show evidence of a circadian cycle. That is highly suggestive of life.
Levin is petitioning ESA and NASA to fly a modified version of his mission to look for "chiral" molecules. These come in left or right-handed versions: they are mirror images of each other. While biological processes tend to produce molecules that favour one chirality over the other, non-living processes create left and right-handed versions in equal numbers. If a future mission to Mars were to find that Martian "metabolism" also prefers one chiral form of a molecule to the other, that would be the best indication yet of life on Mars.
Something on Mars is ingesting nutrients, metabolising them and then belching out radioactive methane.
7 Tetraneutrons
Four years ago, a particle accelerator in France detected six particles that should not exist (see Ghost in the atom). They are called tetraneutrons: four neutrons that are bound together in a way that defies the laws of physics.
Francisco Miguel Marquès and colleagues at the Ganil accelerator in Caen are now gearing up to do it again. If they succeed, these clusters may oblige us to rethink the forces that hold atomic nuclei together.
The team fired beryllium nuclei at a small carbon target and analysed the debris that shot into surrounding particle detectors. They expected to see evidence for four separate neutrons hitting their detectors. Instead the Ganil team found just one flash of light in one detector. And the energy of this flash suggested that four neutrons were arriving together at the detector. Of course, their finding could have been an accident: four neutrons might just have arrived in the same place at the same time by coincidence. But that's ridiculously improbable.
Not as improbable as tetraneutrons, some might say, because in the standard model of particle physics tetraneutrons simply can't exist. According to the Pauli exclusion principle, not even two protons or neutrons in the same system can have identical quantum properties. In fact, the strong nuclear force that would hold them together is tuned in such a way that it can't even hold two lone neutrons together, let alone four. Marquès and his team were so bemused by their result that they buried the data in a research paper that was ostensibly about the possibility of finding tetraneutrons in the future (Physical Review C, vol 65, p 44006).
And there are still more compelling reasons to doubt the existence of tetraneutrons. If you tweak the laws of physics to allow four neutrons to bind together, all kinds of chaos ensues (Journal of Physics G, vol 29, L9). It would mean that the mix of elements formed after the big bang was inconsistent with what we now observe and, even worse, the elements formed would have quickly become far too heavy for the cosmos to cope. "Maybe the universe would have collapsed before it had any chance to expand," says Natalia Timofeyuk, a theorist at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK.
There are, however, a couple of holes in this reasoning. Established theory does allow the tetraneutron to exist - though only as a ridiculously short-lived particle. "This could be a reason for four neutrons hitting the Ganil detectors simultaneously," Timofeyuk says. And there is other evidence that supports the idea of matter composed of multiple neutrons: neutron stars. These bodies, which contain an enormous number of bound neutrons, suggest that as yet unexplained forces come into play when neutrons gather en masse.
8 The Pioneer anomaly
This is a tale of two spacecraft. Pioneer 10 was launched in 1972; Pioneer 11 a year later. By now both craft should be drifting off into deep space with no one watching. However, their trajectories have proved far too fascinating to ignore.
That's because something has been pulling - or pushing - on them, causing them to speed up. The resulting acceleration is tiny, less than a nanometre per second per second. That's equivalent to just one ten-billionth of the gravity at Earth's surface, but it is enough to have shifted Pioneer 10 some 400,000 kilometres off track. NASA lost touch with Pioneer 11 in 1995, but up to that point it was experiencing exactly the same deviation as its sister probe. So what is causing it?
Nobody knows. Some possible explanations have already been ruled out, including software errors, the solar wind or a fuel leak. If the cause is some gravitational effect, it is not one we know anything about. In fact, physicists are so completely at a loss that some have resorted to linking this mystery with other inexplicable phenomena.
Bruce Bassett of the University of Portsmouth, UK, has suggested that the Pioneer conundrum might have something to do with variations in alpha, the fine structure constant. Others have talked about it as arising from dark matter - but since we don't know what dark matter is, that doesn't help much either. "This is all so maddeningly intriguing," says Michael Martin Nieto of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. "We only have proposals, none of which has been demonstrated."
Nieto has called for a new analysis of the early trajectory data from the craft, which he says might yield fresh clues. But to get to the bottom of the problem what scientists really need is a mission designed specifically to test unusual gravitational effects in the outer reaches of the solar system. Such a probe would cost between $300 million and $500 million and could piggyback on a future mission to the outer reaches of the solar system (www.arxiv.org/gr-qc/0411077).
"An explanation will be found eventually," Nieto says. "Of course I hope it is due to new physics - how stupendous that would be. But once a physicist starts working on the basis of hope he is heading for a fall." Disappointing as it may seem, Nieto thinks the explanation for the Pioneer anomaly will eventually be found in some mundane effect, such as an unnoticed source of heat on board the craft.
9 Dark energy
It is one of the most famous, and most embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998, astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at ever faster speeds. It's an effect still searching for a cause - until then, everyone thought the universe's expansion was slowing down after the big bang. "Theorists are still floundering around, looking for a sensible explanation," says cosmologist Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "We're all hoping that upcoming observations of supernovae, of clusters of galaxies and so on will give us more clues."
One suggestion is that some property of empty space is responsible - cosmologists call it dark energy. But all attempts to pin it down have fallen woefully short. It's also possible that Einstein's theory of general relativity may need to be tweaked when applied to the very largest scales of the universe. "The field is still wide open," Freese says.
10 The Kuiper cliff
If you travel out to the far edge of the solar system, into the frigid wastes beyond Pluto, you'll see something strange. Suddenly, after passing through the Kuiper belt, a region of space teeming with icy rocks, there's nothing.
Astronomers call this boundary the Kuiper cliff, because the density of space rocks drops off so steeply. What caused it? The only answer seems to be a 10th planet. We're not talking about Quaoar or Sedna: this is a massive object, as big as Earth or Mars, that has swept the area clean of debris.
The evidence for the existence of "Planet X" is compelling, says Alan Stern, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. But although calculations show that such a body could account for the Kuiper cliff (Icarus, vol 160, p 32), no one has ever seen this fabled 10th planet.
There's a good reason for that. The Kuiper belt is just too far away for us to get a decent view. We need to get out there and have a look before we can say anything about the region. And that won't be possible for another decade, at least. NASA's New Horizons probe, which will head out to Pluto and the Kuiper belt, is scheduled for launch in January 2006. It won't reach Pluto until 2015, so if you are looking for an explanation of the vast, empty gulf of the Kuiper cliff, watch this space.
11 The Wow signal
It was 37 seconds long and came from outer space. On 15 August 1977 it caused astronomer Jerry Ehman, then of Ohio State University in Columbus, to scrawl "Wow!" on the printout from Big Ear, Ohio State's radio telescope in Delaware. And 28 years later no one knows what created the signal. "I am still waiting for a definitive explanation that makes sense," Ehman says.
Coming from the direction of Sagittarius, the pulse of radiation was confined to a narrow range of radio frequencies around 1420 megahertz. This frequency is in a part of the radio spectrum in which all transmissions are prohibited by international agreement. Natural sources of radiation, such as the thermal emissions from planets, usually cover a much broader sweep of frequencies. So what caused it?
The nearest star in that direction is 220 light years away. If that is where is came from, it would have had to be a pretty powerful astronomical event - or an advanced alien civilization using an astonishingly large and powerful transmitter.
The fact that hundreds of sweeps over the same patch of sky have found nothing like the Wow signal doesn't mean it's not aliens. When you consider the fact that the Big Ear telescope covers only one-millionth of the sky at any time, and an alien transmitter would also likely beam out over the same fraction of sky, the chances of spotting the signal again are remote, to say the least.
Others think there must be a mundane explanation. Dan Wertheimer, chief scientist for the SETI@home project, says the Wow signal was almost certainly pollution: radio-frequency interference from Earth-based transmissions. "We've seen many signals like this, and these sorts of signals have always turned out to be interference," he says. The debate continues.
12 Not-so-constant constants
In 1997 astronomer John Webb and his team at the University of New South Wales in Sydney analysed the light reaching Earth from distant quasars. On its 12-billion-year journey, the light had passed through interstellar clouds of metals such as iron, nickel and chromium, and the researchers found these atoms had absorbed some of the photons of quasar light - but not the ones they were expecting.
If the observations are correct, the only vaguely reasonable explanation is that a constant of physics called the fine structure constant, or alpha, had a different value at the time the light passed through the clouds.
But that's heresy. Alpha is an extremely important constant that determines how light interacts with matter - and it shouldn't be able to change. Its value depends on, among other things, the charge on the electron, the speed of light and Planck's constant. Could one of these really have changed?
No one in physics wanted to believe the measurements. Webb and his team have been trying for years to find an error in their results. But so far they have failed.
Webb's are not the only results that suggest something is missing from our understanding of alpha. A recent analysis of the only known natural nuclear reactor, which was active nearly 2 billion years ago at what is now Oklo in Gabon, also suggests something about light's interaction with matter has changed.
The ratio of certain radioactive isotopes produced within such a reactor depends on alpha, and so looking at the fission products left behind in the ground at Oklo provides a way to work out the value of the constant at the time of their formation. Using this method, Steve Lamoreaux and his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico suggest that alpha may have decreased by more than 4 per cent since Oklo started up (Physical Review D, vol 69, p 121701).
There are gainsayers who still dispute any change in alpha. Patrick Petitjean, an astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, led a team that analysed quasar light picked up by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and found no evidence that alpha has changed. But Webb, who is now looking at the VLT measurements, says that they require a more complex analysis than Petitjean's team has carried out. Webb's group is working on that now, and may be in a position to declare the anomaly resolved - or not - later this year.
"It's difficult to say how long it's going to take," says team member Michael Murphy of the University of Cambridge. "The more we look at these new data, the more difficulties we see." But whatever the answer, the work will still be valuable. An analysis of the way light passes through distant molecular clouds will reveal more about how the elements were produced early in the universe's history.
Update: No such thing as a constant constant?
13 Cold fusion
After 16 years, it's back. In fact, cold fusion never really went away. Over a 10-year period from 1989, US navy labs ran more than 200 experiments to investigate whether nuclear reactions generating more energy than they consume - supposedly only possible inside stars - can occur at room temperature. Numerous researchers have since pronounced themselves believers.
With controllable cold fusion, many of the world's energy problems would melt away: no wonder the US Department of Energy is interested. In December, after a lengthy review of the evidence, it said it was open to receiving proposals for new cold fusion experiments.
That's quite a turnaround. The DoE's first report on the subject, published 15 years ago, concluded that the original cold fusion results, produced by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and unveiled at a press conference in 1989, were impossible to reproduce, and thus probably false.
The basic claim of cold fusion is that dunking palladium electrodes into heavy water - in which oxygen is combined with the hydrogen isotope deuterium - can release a large amount of energy. Placing a voltage across the electrodes supposedly allows deuterium nuclei to move into palladium's molecular lattice, enabling them to overcome their natural repulsion and fuse together, releasing a blast of energy. The snag is that fusion at room temperature is deemed impossible by every accepted scientific theory.
Cold fusion would make the world's energy problems melt away. No wonder the Department of Energy is interested.
That doesn't matter, according to David Nagel, an engineer at George Washington University in Washington DC. Superconductors took 40 years to explain, he points out, so there's no reason to dismiss cold fusion. "The experimental case is bulletproof," he says. "You can't make it go away."
My comment: Perhaps this is the biggest difference between the Institution of Science and the Institution of Religion. In both cases, things happen that violate known expectations. Science calls these things anomalies, religion calls them miracles. In science, it’s a call to do more research. In religion it’s a cause to work ourselves into a state of awe—by not doing research, not asking questions. Just by standing in awe of the miracle. That is, that is the behavior of those involved in the Institutions. Lay people, the casual to avid follower of scientific research, and those deeply involved in spiritual inquiries, those not tied to the rules of the institutions can ask anything they would like, to draw implications in any direction reason and logic take them. Personally, standing in awe of a miracle doesn’t do much for me. Inquiring into the implications of the miracle, finding that the miracle is actually an illustration of a normal scientific process that occurs, for us, at microscopic or molecular level, or on a cosmological level—this does more for me, this makes me approach the Torah with caution and awe. For instance, Moses getting water from a rock is considered a miracle because, usually, rocks don’t have an internal fountain—until you realize that the earth itself is a rock with an internal fountain. The implications are that the universe may be structured along holographic principles or principles not unlike fractals. When the artificial boundaries and compartments that we use to categorize knowledge, when these walls begin to break, when the knowledge begins to fall together like a beautiful puzzle, these are powerful emotions—this is what I would term ‘awe.’
1 The placebo effect
Don't try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.
This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.
So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.
Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's disease. He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients' brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson's symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer "bursts" of firing - another feature associated with Parkinson's. The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something.
We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body's biochemistry. "The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction," he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don't know.
2 The horizon problem
Our universe appears to be unfathomably uniform. Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other, and you'll see that the microwave background radiation filling the cosmos is at the same temperature everywhere. That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old.
Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have traveled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.
This "horizon problem" is a big headache for cosmologists, so big that they have come up with some pretty wild solutions. "Inflation", for example.
You can solve the horizon problem by having the universe expand ultra-fast for a time, just after the big bang, blowing up by a factor of 1050 in 10-33 seconds. But is that just wishful thinking? "Inflation would be an explanation if it occurred," says University of Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees. The trouble is that no one knows what could have made that happen – but see Inside inflation: after the big bang.
So, in effect, inflation solves one mystery only to invoke another. A variation in the speed of light could also solve the horizon problem - but this too is impotent in the face of the question "why?" In scientific terms, the uniform temperature of the background radiation remains an anomaly.
A variation in the speed of light could solve the problem, but this too is impotent in the face of the question 'why?'
3 Ultra-energetic cosmic rays
For more than a decade, physicists in Japan have been seeing cosmic rays that should not exist. Cosmic rays are particles - mostly protons but sometimes heavy atomic nuclei - that travel through the universe at close to the speed of light. Some cosmic rays detected on Earth are produced in violent events such as supernovae, but we still don't know the origins of the highest-energy particles, which are the most energetic particles ever seen in nature. But that's not the real mystery.
As cosmic-ray particles travel through space, they lose energy in collisions with the low-energy photons that pervade the universe, such as those of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Einstein's special theory of relativity dictates that any cosmic rays reaching Earth from a source outside our galaxy will have suffered so many energy-shedding collisions that their maximum possible energy is 5 × 1019 electronvolts. This is known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit.
Over the past decade, however, the University of Tokyo's Akeno Giant Air Shower Array - 111 particle detectors spread out over 100 square kilometres - has detected several cosmic rays above the GZK limit. In theory, they can only have come from within our galaxy, avoiding an energy-sapping journey across the cosmos. However, astronomers can find no source for these cosmic rays in our galaxy. So what is going on?
One possibility is that there is something wrong with the Akeno results. Another is that Einstein was wrong. His special theory of relativity says that space is the same in all directions, but what if particles found it easier to move in certain directions? Then the cosmic rays could retain more of their energy, allowing them to beat the GZK limit.
Physicists at the Pierre Auger experiment in Mendoza, Argentina, are now working on this problem. Using 1600 detectors spread over 3000 square kilometres, Auger should be able to determine the energies of incoming cosmic rays and shed more light on the Akeno results.
Alan Watson, an astronomer at the University of Leeds, UK, and spokesman for the Pierre Auger project, is already convinced there is something worth following up here. "I have no doubts that events above 1020 electronvolts exist. There are sufficient examples to convince me," he says. The question now is, what are they? How many of these particles are coming in, and what direction are they coming from? Until we get that information, there's no telling how exotic the true explanation could be.
Update: Follow the latest hunt for GZK neutrinos.
4 Belfast homeopathy results
Madeline Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.
In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.
So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.
You can understand why Ennis remains skeptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.
5 Dark matter
Take our best understanding of gravity, apply it to the way galaxies spin, and you'll quickly see the problem: the galaxies should be falling apart. Galactic matter orbits around a central point because its mutual gravitational attraction creates centripetal forces. But there is not enough mass in the galaxies to produce the observed spin.
Vera Rubin, an astronomer working at the Carnegie Institution's department of terrestrial magnetism in Washington DC, spotted this anomaly in the late 1970s. The best response from physicists was to suggest there is more stuff out there than we can see. The trouble was, nobody could explain what this "dark matter" was.
And they still can't. Although researchers have made many suggestions about what kind of particles might make up dark matter, there is no consensus. It's an embarrassing hole in our understanding. Astronomical observations suggest that dark matter must make up about 90 per cent of the mass in the universe, yet we are astonishingly ignorant what that 90 per cent is.
Maybe we can't work out what dark matter is because it doesn't actually exist. That's certainly the way Rubin would like it to turn out. "If I could have my pick, I would like to learn that Newton's laws must be modified in order to correctly describe gravitational interactions at large distances," she says. "That's more appealing than a universe filled with a new kind of sub-nuclear particle."
Update: Some scientists are trying to create the stuff themselves. See Let there be dark matter.
If the results turn out to be real, the implications are profound. We may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.
6 Viking's methane
July 20, 1976. Gilbert Levin is on the edge of his seat. Millions of kilometres away on Mars, the Viking landers have scooped up some soil and mixed it with carbon-14-labelled nutrients. The mission's scientists have all agreed that if Levin's instruments on board the landers detect emissions of carbon-14-containing methane from the soil, then there must be life on Mars.
Viking reports a positive result. Something is ingesting the nutrients, metabolising them, and then belching out gas laced with carbon-14.
So why no party?
Because another instrument, designed to identify organic molecules considered essential signs of life, found nothing. Almost all the mission scientists erred on the side of caution and declared Viking's discovery a false positive. But was it?
The arguments continue to rage, but results from NASA's latest rovers show that the surface of Mars was almost certainly wet in the past and therefore hospitable to life. And there is plenty more evidence where that came from, Levin says. "Every mission to Mars has produced evidence supporting my conclusion. None has contradicted it."
Levin stands by his claim, and he is no longer alone. Joe Miller, a cell biologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has re-analysed the data and he thinks that the emissions show evidence of a circadian cycle. That is highly suggestive of life.
Levin is petitioning ESA and NASA to fly a modified version of his mission to look for "chiral" molecules. These come in left or right-handed versions: they are mirror images of each other. While biological processes tend to produce molecules that favour one chirality over the other, non-living processes create left and right-handed versions in equal numbers. If a future mission to Mars were to find that Martian "metabolism" also prefers one chiral form of a molecule to the other, that would be the best indication yet of life on Mars.
Something on Mars is ingesting nutrients, metabolising them and then belching out radioactive methane.
7 Tetraneutrons
Four years ago, a particle accelerator in France detected six particles that should not exist (see Ghost in the atom). They are called tetraneutrons: four neutrons that are bound together in a way that defies the laws of physics.
Francisco Miguel Marquès and colleagues at the Ganil accelerator in Caen are now gearing up to do it again. If they succeed, these clusters may oblige us to rethink the forces that hold atomic nuclei together.
The team fired beryllium nuclei at a small carbon target and analysed the debris that shot into surrounding particle detectors. They expected to see evidence for four separate neutrons hitting their detectors. Instead the Ganil team found just one flash of light in one detector. And the energy of this flash suggested that four neutrons were arriving together at the detector. Of course, their finding could have been an accident: four neutrons might just have arrived in the same place at the same time by coincidence. But that's ridiculously improbable.
Not as improbable as tetraneutrons, some might say, because in the standard model of particle physics tetraneutrons simply can't exist. According to the Pauli exclusion principle, not even two protons or neutrons in the same system can have identical quantum properties. In fact, the strong nuclear force that would hold them together is tuned in such a way that it can't even hold two lone neutrons together, let alone four. Marquès and his team were so bemused by their result that they buried the data in a research paper that was ostensibly about the possibility of finding tetraneutrons in the future (Physical Review C, vol 65, p 44006).
And there are still more compelling reasons to doubt the existence of tetraneutrons. If you tweak the laws of physics to allow four neutrons to bind together, all kinds of chaos ensues (Journal of Physics G, vol 29, L9). It would mean that the mix of elements formed after the big bang was inconsistent with what we now observe and, even worse, the elements formed would have quickly become far too heavy for the cosmos to cope. "Maybe the universe would have collapsed before it had any chance to expand," says Natalia Timofeyuk, a theorist at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK.
There are, however, a couple of holes in this reasoning. Established theory does allow the tetraneutron to exist - though only as a ridiculously short-lived particle. "This could be a reason for four neutrons hitting the Ganil detectors simultaneously," Timofeyuk says. And there is other evidence that supports the idea of matter composed of multiple neutrons: neutron stars. These bodies, which contain an enormous number of bound neutrons, suggest that as yet unexplained forces come into play when neutrons gather en masse.
8 The Pioneer anomaly
This is a tale of two spacecraft. Pioneer 10 was launched in 1972; Pioneer 11 a year later. By now both craft should be drifting off into deep space with no one watching. However, their trajectories have proved far too fascinating to ignore.
That's because something has been pulling - or pushing - on them, causing them to speed up. The resulting acceleration is tiny, less than a nanometre per second per second. That's equivalent to just one ten-billionth of the gravity at Earth's surface, but it is enough to have shifted Pioneer 10 some 400,000 kilometres off track. NASA lost touch with Pioneer 11 in 1995, but up to that point it was experiencing exactly the same deviation as its sister probe. So what is causing it?
Nobody knows. Some possible explanations have already been ruled out, including software errors, the solar wind or a fuel leak. If the cause is some gravitational effect, it is not one we know anything about. In fact, physicists are so completely at a loss that some have resorted to linking this mystery with other inexplicable phenomena.
Bruce Bassett of the University of Portsmouth, UK, has suggested that the Pioneer conundrum might have something to do with variations in alpha, the fine structure constant. Others have talked about it as arising from dark matter - but since we don't know what dark matter is, that doesn't help much either. "This is all so maddeningly intriguing," says Michael Martin Nieto of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. "We only have proposals, none of which has been demonstrated."
Nieto has called for a new analysis of the early trajectory data from the craft, which he says might yield fresh clues. But to get to the bottom of the problem what scientists really need is a mission designed specifically to test unusual gravitational effects in the outer reaches of the solar system. Such a probe would cost between $300 million and $500 million and could piggyback on a future mission to the outer reaches of the solar system (www.arxiv.org/gr-qc/0411077).
"An explanation will be found eventually," Nieto says. "Of course I hope it is due to new physics - how stupendous that would be. But once a physicist starts working on the basis of hope he is heading for a fall." Disappointing as it may seem, Nieto thinks the explanation for the Pioneer anomaly will eventually be found in some mundane effect, such as an unnoticed source of heat on board the craft.
9 Dark energy
It is one of the most famous, and most embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998, astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at ever faster speeds. It's an effect still searching for a cause - until then, everyone thought the universe's expansion was slowing down after the big bang. "Theorists are still floundering around, looking for a sensible explanation," says cosmologist Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "We're all hoping that upcoming observations of supernovae, of clusters of galaxies and so on will give us more clues."
One suggestion is that some property of empty space is responsible - cosmologists call it dark energy. But all attempts to pin it down have fallen woefully short. It's also possible that Einstein's theory of general relativity may need to be tweaked when applied to the very largest scales of the universe. "The field is still wide open," Freese says.
10 The Kuiper cliff
If you travel out to the far edge of the solar system, into the frigid wastes beyond Pluto, you'll see something strange. Suddenly, after passing through the Kuiper belt, a region of space teeming with icy rocks, there's nothing.
Astronomers call this boundary the Kuiper cliff, because the density of space rocks drops off so steeply. What caused it? The only answer seems to be a 10th planet. We're not talking about Quaoar or Sedna: this is a massive object, as big as Earth or Mars, that has swept the area clean of debris.
The evidence for the existence of "Planet X" is compelling, says Alan Stern, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. But although calculations show that such a body could account for the Kuiper cliff (Icarus, vol 160, p 32), no one has ever seen this fabled 10th planet.
There's a good reason for that. The Kuiper belt is just too far away for us to get a decent view. We need to get out there and have a look before we can say anything about the region. And that won't be possible for another decade, at least. NASA's New Horizons probe, which will head out to Pluto and the Kuiper belt, is scheduled for launch in January 2006. It won't reach Pluto until 2015, so if you are looking for an explanation of the vast, empty gulf of the Kuiper cliff, watch this space.
11 The Wow signal
It was 37 seconds long and came from outer space. On 15 August 1977 it caused astronomer Jerry Ehman, then of Ohio State University in Columbus, to scrawl "Wow!" on the printout from Big Ear, Ohio State's radio telescope in Delaware. And 28 years later no one knows what created the signal. "I am still waiting for a definitive explanation that makes sense," Ehman says.
Coming from the direction of Sagittarius, the pulse of radiation was confined to a narrow range of radio frequencies around 1420 megahertz. This frequency is in a part of the radio spectrum in which all transmissions are prohibited by international agreement. Natural sources of radiation, such as the thermal emissions from planets, usually cover a much broader sweep of frequencies. So what caused it?
The nearest star in that direction is 220 light years away. If that is where is came from, it would have had to be a pretty powerful astronomical event - or an advanced alien civilization using an astonishingly large and powerful transmitter.
The fact that hundreds of sweeps over the same patch of sky have found nothing like the Wow signal doesn't mean it's not aliens. When you consider the fact that the Big Ear telescope covers only one-millionth of the sky at any time, and an alien transmitter would also likely beam out over the same fraction of sky, the chances of spotting the signal again are remote, to say the least.
Others think there must be a mundane explanation. Dan Wertheimer, chief scientist for the SETI@home project, says the Wow signal was almost certainly pollution: radio-frequency interference from Earth-based transmissions. "We've seen many signals like this, and these sorts of signals have always turned out to be interference," he says. The debate continues.
12 Not-so-constant constants
In 1997 astronomer John Webb and his team at the University of New South Wales in Sydney analysed the light reaching Earth from distant quasars. On its 12-billion-year journey, the light had passed through interstellar clouds of metals such as iron, nickel and chromium, and the researchers found these atoms had absorbed some of the photons of quasar light - but not the ones they were expecting.
If the observations are correct, the only vaguely reasonable explanation is that a constant of physics called the fine structure constant, or alpha, had a different value at the time the light passed through the clouds.
But that's heresy. Alpha is an extremely important constant that determines how light interacts with matter - and it shouldn't be able to change. Its value depends on, among other things, the charge on the electron, the speed of light and Planck's constant. Could one of these really have changed?
No one in physics wanted to believe the measurements. Webb and his team have been trying for years to find an error in their results. But so far they have failed.
Webb's are not the only results that suggest something is missing from our understanding of alpha. A recent analysis of the only known natural nuclear reactor, which was active nearly 2 billion years ago at what is now Oklo in Gabon, also suggests something about light's interaction with matter has changed.
The ratio of certain radioactive isotopes produced within such a reactor depends on alpha, and so looking at the fission products left behind in the ground at Oklo provides a way to work out the value of the constant at the time of their formation. Using this method, Steve Lamoreaux and his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico suggest that alpha may have decreased by more than 4 per cent since Oklo started up (Physical Review D, vol 69, p 121701).
There are gainsayers who still dispute any change in alpha. Patrick Petitjean, an astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, led a team that analysed quasar light picked up by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and found no evidence that alpha has changed. But Webb, who is now looking at the VLT measurements, says that they require a more complex analysis than Petitjean's team has carried out. Webb's group is working on that now, and may be in a position to declare the anomaly resolved - or not - later this year.
"It's difficult to say how long it's going to take," says team member Michael Murphy of the University of Cambridge. "The more we look at these new data, the more difficulties we see." But whatever the answer, the work will still be valuable. An analysis of the way light passes through distant molecular clouds will reveal more about how the elements were produced early in the universe's history.
Update: No such thing as a constant constant?
13 Cold fusion
After 16 years, it's back. In fact, cold fusion never really went away. Over a 10-year period from 1989, US navy labs ran more than 200 experiments to investigate whether nuclear reactions generating more energy than they consume - supposedly only possible inside stars - can occur at room temperature. Numerous researchers have since pronounced themselves believers.
With controllable cold fusion, many of the world's energy problems would melt away: no wonder the US Department of Energy is interested. In December, after a lengthy review of the evidence, it said it was open to receiving proposals for new cold fusion experiments.
That's quite a turnaround. The DoE's first report on the subject, published 15 years ago, concluded that the original cold fusion results, produced by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and unveiled at a press conference in 1989, were impossible to reproduce, and thus probably false.
The basic claim of cold fusion is that dunking palladium electrodes into heavy water - in which oxygen is combined with the hydrogen isotope deuterium - can release a large amount of energy. Placing a voltage across the electrodes supposedly allows deuterium nuclei to move into palladium's molecular lattice, enabling them to overcome their natural repulsion and fuse together, releasing a blast of energy. The snag is that fusion at room temperature is deemed impossible by every accepted scientific theory.
Cold fusion would make the world's energy problems melt away. No wonder the Department of Energy is interested.
That doesn't matter, according to David Nagel, an engineer at George Washington University in Washington DC. Superconductors took 40 years to explain, he points out, so there's no reason to dismiss cold fusion. "The experimental case is bulletproof," he says. "You can't make it go away."
My comment: Perhaps this is the biggest difference between the Institution of Science and the Institution of Religion. In both cases, things happen that violate known expectations. Science calls these things anomalies, religion calls them miracles. In science, it’s a call to do more research. In religion it’s a cause to work ourselves into a state of awe—by not doing research, not asking questions. Just by standing in awe of the miracle. That is, that is the behavior of those involved in the Institutions. Lay people, the casual to avid follower of scientific research, and those deeply involved in spiritual inquiries, those not tied to the rules of the institutions can ask anything they would like, to draw implications in any direction reason and logic take them. Personally, standing in awe of a miracle doesn’t do much for me. Inquiring into the implications of the miracle, finding that the miracle is actually an illustration of a normal scientific process that occurs, for us, at microscopic or molecular level, or on a cosmological level—this does more for me, this makes me approach the Torah with caution and awe. For instance, Moses getting water from a rock is considered a miracle because, usually, rocks don’t have an internal fountain—until you realize that the earth itself is a rock with an internal fountain. The implications are that the universe may be structured along holographic principles or principles not unlike fractals. When the artificial boundaries and compartments that we use to categorize knowledge, when these walls begin to break, when the knowledge begins to fall together like a beautiful puzzle, these are powerful emotions—this is what I would term ‘awe.’
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Jumping Genes
ScienceDaily (Mar. 19, 2008) — They can be found in plants, animals and even in humans – inactive remains of jumping genes, transposons. Researchers are striving to develop active transposons from these remains, using them as tools to decode gene function. At the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch, Germany, researchers have now succeeded in reconstructing the first active transposon of the Harbinger transposon superfamily.
In the laboratory, the artificial transposon developed by Dr. Ludivine Sinzelle, Dr. Zsuzsanna Izsvák, and Dr. Zoltán Ivics also shows cut-and-paste transposition in human cells and promises to serve as a useful experimental system for investigating human gene function.
Transposons comprise about half of the human genome. “They are molecular parasites, similar to fleas, only that they are in the genome of the host and not on its back,” Dr. Zoltán Ivics explained. They jump, move, and proliferate through the host, without whom they could not survive. In most cases, transposons do not fulfill any function in the human genome. “However, not all are superfluous,” Dr. Ivics went on to say. “More than 100 active genes, including some associated with the immune system, have been recognized as probably derived from transposons.”
To reconstruct an active transposon, Dr. Ivics’ team compared the DNA of various inactive Harbinger transposons, one of the largest superfamilies of transposons. Based on these results, they developed an artificial jumping gene. “We were very lucky,” Dr. Ivics said. “The very first experiment was successful.”
New tool for basic research
In the cell lab, the MDC researchers inserted the transposon into the human cell by means of a gene shuttle. Via a cut-and-paste mechanism, the artificial transposon excises itself from its transport vehicle and inserts itself into the genome of the cell. If the transposon jumps into an important gene and deactivates it, it may impair important processes in the cell. As a result, researchers can draw conclusions about the function of the gene.
Moreover, in the course of evolution, transposons have been responsible for the emergence of new genes. Thus, through computerized gene analysis, Dr. Ivics’ research team has discovered two new elements related to the Harbinger transposon. In a new project, Dr. Ivics aims to elucidate just what role these play in the human body.
Over the long term, scientists hope to use such transposons in gene therapy as well. With the aid of a transposon, an intact copy of a gene could be incorporated into the genome of a patient to repair a defective gene. “But until this can happen, there is still a lot to be done,” Dr. Ivics pointed out. “The new gene should not just jump in anywhere.”
My Comment: The Torah hints at the existence of DNA when Jacob breeds Laban's sheep. It cross-references the allusion during the lengthy Midrashic discussions of the effect of the anointing oil on David, before he became king, when David's appearance quickly changes to fit into King Saul's armor. And sometimes life throws another cross reference your way outside of scripture--when my neighbor, the microbiologist looked at a picture of the windings of the shel yad tefillin and said in a quite surprised manner--that is exactly the way DNA is wound into a cell." If nothing else, this aritcle shows the ancient Chinese axiom that there is no end to smallness. Not to mention it shows the mind-bending complexity that goes into just one second of existence.
The fact is, both Torah scholars and scientists have a ways to go before anyone can claim to fully understand either the Torah passages or the workings of DNA. The proof will be when our civilization can address and heal chronic diseases. Don't be surprised to hear the same conclusions said in two different ways.
In the laboratory, the artificial transposon developed by Dr. Ludivine Sinzelle, Dr. Zsuzsanna Izsvák, and Dr. Zoltán Ivics also shows cut-and-paste transposition in human cells and promises to serve as a useful experimental system for investigating human gene function.
Transposons comprise about half of the human genome. “They are molecular parasites, similar to fleas, only that they are in the genome of the host and not on its back,” Dr. Zoltán Ivics explained. They jump, move, and proliferate through the host, without whom they could not survive. In most cases, transposons do not fulfill any function in the human genome. “However, not all are superfluous,” Dr. Ivics went on to say. “More than 100 active genes, including some associated with the immune system, have been recognized as probably derived from transposons.”
To reconstruct an active transposon, Dr. Ivics’ team compared the DNA of various inactive Harbinger transposons, one of the largest superfamilies of transposons. Based on these results, they developed an artificial jumping gene. “We were very lucky,” Dr. Ivics said. “The very first experiment was successful.”
New tool for basic research
In the cell lab, the MDC researchers inserted the transposon into the human cell by means of a gene shuttle. Via a cut-and-paste mechanism, the artificial transposon excises itself from its transport vehicle and inserts itself into the genome of the cell. If the transposon jumps into an important gene and deactivates it, it may impair important processes in the cell. As a result, researchers can draw conclusions about the function of the gene.
Moreover, in the course of evolution, transposons have been responsible for the emergence of new genes. Thus, through computerized gene analysis, Dr. Ivics’ research team has discovered two new elements related to the Harbinger transposon. In a new project, Dr. Ivics aims to elucidate just what role these play in the human body.
Over the long term, scientists hope to use such transposons in gene therapy as well. With the aid of a transposon, an intact copy of a gene could be incorporated into the genome of a patient to repair a defective gene. “But until this can happen, there is still a lot to be done,” Dr. Ivics pointed out. “The new gene should not just jump in anywhere.”
My Comment: The Torah hints at the existence of DNA when Jacob breeds Laban's sheep. It cross-references the allusion during the lengthy Midrashic discussions of the effect of the anointing oil on David, before he became king, when David's appearance quickly changes to fit into King Saul's armor. And sometimes life throws another cross reference your way outside of scripture--when my neighbor, the microbiologist looked at a picture of the windings of the shel yad tefillin and said in a quite surprised manner--that is exactly the way DNA is wound into a cell." If nothing else, this aritcle shows the ancient Chinese axiom that there is no end to smallness. Not to mention it shows the mind-bending complexity that goes into just one second of existence.
The fact is, both Torah scholars and scientists have a ways to go before anyone can claim to fully understand either the Torah passages or the workings of DNA. The proof will be when our civilization can address and heal chronic diseases. Don't be surprised to hear the same conclusions said in two different ways.
Monday, September 14, 2009
The Universe May be a Hologram
The universe may be a giant Hologram.
The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.
The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard 't Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.
The research cited in the article, measurements taken as part of the GEO600 experiment outside of Hanover, Germany, fall well short of proving that we live in a hologram. What we have so far is some background noise very similar to the background noise predicted by Craig Hogan, director of the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics, in his description of the ultimate "graininess" of the universe.
So out at the edge of the universe, you will find the "real" universe: a two-dimensional structure with resolution down to the Planck length. Here in the (fake? shadow? projected?) less-real universe, life is a lot blurrier than that, as our "pixels" are much, much bigger -- 19 orders of magnitude bigger, if I'm reading it correctly. So we live in this big, blurry, 3D rendering of the real, much smaller and more fine-grained universe.
I'm not sure how significant this is. It all sounds kind of strange, but then the universe has to work somehow or other, doesn't it?
My Comment: This is how the Rabbis say it: Gd looked at the Torah and created the universe.
The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.
The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard 't Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.
The research cited in the article, measurements taken as part of the GEO600 experiment outside of Hanover, Germany, fall well short of proving that we live in a hologram. What we have so far is some background noise very similar to the background noise predicted by Craig Hogan, director of the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics, in his description of the ultimate "graininess" of the universe.
So out at the edge of the universe, you will find the "real" universe: a two-dimensional structure with resolution down to the Planck length. Here in the (fake? shadow? projected?) less-real universe, life is a lot blurrier than that, as our "pixels" are much, much bigger -- 19 orders of magnitude bigger, if I'm reading it correctly. So we live in this big, blurry, 3D rendering of the real, much smaller and more fine-grained universe.
I'm not sure how significant this is. It all sounds kind of strange, but then the universe has to work somehow or other, doesn't it?
My Comment: This is how the Rabbis say it: Gd looked at the Torah and created the universe.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Is the Universe Conscious?
From the Pages of Science News: 8/15/08
Do subatomic particles have free will?
If we have free will, so do subatomic particles, mathematicians claim to prove.
“If the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect—what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth?”—Titus Lucretius Carus, Roman philosopher and poet, 99–55 BC.
Human free will might seem like the squishiest of philosophical subjects, way beyond the realm of mathematical demonstration. But two highly regarded Princeton mathematicians, John Conway and Simon Kochen, claim to have proven that if humans have even the tiniest amount of free will, then atoms themselves must also behave unpredictably.
The finding won’t give many physicists a moment’s worry, because traditional interpretations of quantum mechanics embrace unpredictability already. The best anyone can hope to do, quantum theory says, is predict the probability that a particle will behave in a certain way.
But physicists all the way back to Einstein have been unhappy with this idea. Einstein famously grumped, “God does not play dice.” And indeed, ever since the birth of quantum mechanics, some physicists have offered alternate interpretations of its equations that aim to get rid of this indeterminism. The most famous alternative is attributed to the physicist David Bohm, who argued in the 1950s that the behavior of subatomic particles is entirely determined by “hidden variables” that cannot be observed.
Conway and Kochen say this search is hopeless, and they claim to have proven that indeterminacy is inherent in the world itself, rather than just in quantum theory. And to Bohmians and other like-minded physicists, the pair says: Give up determinism, or give up free will. Even the tiniest bit of free will.
Their argument starts with a proof Kochen created with Ernst Specker 40 years ago. Subatomic particles have a property called “spin,” which occurs around any axis. Experiments have shown that a type of subatomic particle called a “spin 1 particle” has a peculiar property: Choose three perpendicular axes, and prod the spin 1 particle to determine whether its spin around each of those axes is 0. Precisely one of those axes will have spin 0 and the other two will have non-zero spin. Conway and Kochen call this the 1-0-1 rule.
Spin is one of those properties physicists can’t predict in advance, before prodding. Still, one might imagine that the particle’s spin around any axis was set before anyone ever came along to prod it. That’s certainly what we ordinarily assume in life. We don’t imagine, say, that a fence turned white just because we looked at it — we figure it was white all along.
But Kochen and Specker showed that this assumption — that the fence was white all along — can’t hold in the bizarre world of subatomic particles. They used a pure mathematical argument to show that there is no way the particle can choose spins around every imaginable axis in a way that is consistent with the 1-0-1 rule. Indeed, there is a set of just 33 axes that are enough to force the particle into a paradox. It could choose spins around the first 32 axes that conform with the rule, but for the last, neither 0 nor non-zero would do. Choosing zero spin would create a set of three perpendicular axes with two zeroes, and choosing non-zero spin would create a different set of three perpendicular axes with three non-zeroes, breaking the 1-0-1 rule either way.
This means that the particle cannot have a definite spin in every direction before it’s measured, Kochen and Specker concluded. If it did, physicists would be able to occasionally observe it breaking the 1-0-1 rule, which never happens. Instead, it must “decide” which spin to have on the fly.
Conway compares the situation to the game “Twenty Questions.” If you play the game fairly, you decide upfront on a single object and honestly answer each of the questions, hoping your opponent won’t deduce what you chose. But a clever player could also cheat, changing the object partway through. In that case, his answers aren’t determined in advance. The particle, Kochen and Specker showed, is like a cheating player. They found it out by showing that no single object satisfies all the “questions” (or all 33 axes) at once.
But there’s another possible interpretation. Perhaps the particle’s spin is completely determined — but depends on something else about the state of the universe. That would be like a player in “Twenty Questions” who has decided his object is a donkey whenever his opponent starts a question with “Is,” and that his object a horse otherwise (or using any other arbitrary but consistent rule). For example, if his opponent asked, “Is it something with big ears?” he would say “yes,” but if his opponent asked, “Does it have big ears?” he’d say “no.” In that case, his answers are predetermined even though he has no single object in mind.
Conway and Kochen say that they have now proven that particles’ responses can’t be pre-determined, even within this possible interpretation. “We can really prove that there’s no algorithm, no way that the particle can give an answer that is unique and can be specified ahead of time,” Conway says. “I’m still amazed that we can actually manage to prove that.”
They concocted a thought experiment for their proof. It is possible to entangle two spin 1 particles so that their spins are identical along every possible axis and will remain so, even if they are separated very far apart. Entangle two particles this way, and then send a physicist named Alice with one of them to Mars and leave the other with a physicist named Bob on Earth. That will prevent information from passing between the physicists or the particles, according to relativity theory. Alice and Bob each prod their particles along some axis, which they freely choose. If Alice and Bob happen to choose the same axis, they’ll get the same answer.
Now, imagine that the particles are like the “20 questions” player whose object is sometimes a donkey and sometimes a horse, with a fixed rule deciding when to answer with which animal. Whatever the rule is, it applies to each of the entangled particles and will cause them to have the same spins. It’s as if the “20 questions” player has been cloned, and both players are forced to give answers for the same animal.
But Conway and Kochen have shown this scenario is impossible for particles that are incommunicado. They invoked the old Kochen-Specker paradox to show that if the spin 1 particle’s behavior is pre-determined so that it isn’t allowed to “change its animal,” it won’t be able to give answers that are consistent with the 1-0-1 rule. So if Alice and Bob are lucky in how they choose their axes, they should be able to force the particles either to disagree or to violate the 1-0-1 rule — contrary to experimental evidence.
Kochen and Conway say the best way out of this paradox is to accept that the particle’s spin doesn’t exist until it’s measured. But there’s one way to escape their noose: Suppose for a moment that Alice and Bob’s choice of axis to measure is not a free choice. Then Nature could be conspiring to prevent them from choosing the axes that will reveal the violation of the rule. Kochen and Conway can’t rule that possibility out entirely, but Kochen says, “A man on the street would say, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ A natural feeling is, of course, that what we do, we do of our own free will. Not completely, but certainly to the point of knowing we can choose what button to push in an experiment.”
Ideally, a mathematical proof settles all uncertainty, but Kochen and Conway haven’t yet managed to convince many of the physicists they are addressing. “I’m not convinced,” says Sheldon Goldstein of Rutgers University, a Bohmian. He believes the argument implies nothing new, and he’s content with the notion that free will exists only effectively (not theoretically). He and his collaborators have spent many hours discussing these issues with the pair of mathematicians since Kochen and Conway first posted their result four years ago. Their new version, posted on Arxiv.org July 21, attempts to strengthen the result in light of criticisms. Still, mutual understanding has not yet come about. “It’s kind of depressing when people can’t communicate with each other,” Goldstein says. “We know that’s true in politics, but you’d think that wouldn’t be going on here.”
But Gerard ’t Hooft of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1999, says the pair’s conclusions are legitimate — but he chooses determinism over free will. “As a determined determinist I would say that yes, you bet, an experimenter's choice what to measure was fixed from the dawn of time, and so were the properties of the thing he decided to call a photon,” Hooft says. “If you believe in determinism, you have to believe it all the way. No escape possible. Conway and Kochen have shown here in a beautiful way that a half-hearted belief in pseudo-determinism is impossible to sustain.”
My Comment: And so the question of a conscious universe is raised.
Do subatomic particles have free will?
If we have free will, so do subatomic particles, mathematicians claim to prove.
“If the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect—what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth?”—Titus Lucretius Carus, Roman philosopher and poet, 99–55 BC.
Human free will might seem like the squishiest of philosophical subjects, way beyond the realm of mathematical demonstration. But two highly regarded Princeton mathematicians, John Conway and Simon Kochen, claim to have proven that if humans have even the tiniest amount of free will, then atoms themselves must also behave unpredictably.
The finding won’t give many physicists a moment’s worry, because traditional interpretations of quantum mechanics embrace unpredictability already. The best anyone can hope to do, quantum theory says, is predict the probability that a particle will behave in a certain way.
But physicists all the way back to Einstein have been unhappy with this idea. Einstein famously grumped, “God does not play dice.” And indeed, ever since the birth of quantum mechanics, some physicists have offered alternate interpretations of its equations that aim to get rid of this indeterminism. The most famous alternative is attributed to the physicist David Bohm, who argued in the 1950s that the behavior of subatomic particles is entirely determined by “hidden variables” that cannot be observed.
Conway and Kochen say this search is hopeless, and they claim to have proven that indeterminacy is inherent in the world itself, rather than just in quantum theory. And to Bohmians and other like-minded physicists, the pair says: Give up determinism, or give up free will. Even the tiniest bit of free will.
Their argument starts with a proof Kochen created with Ernst Specker 40 years ago. Subatomic particles have a property called “spin,” which occurs around any axis. Experiments have shown that a type of subatomic particle called a “spin 1 particle” has a peculiar property: Choose three perpendicular axes, and prod the spin 1 particle to determine whether its spin around each of those axes is 0. Precisely one of those axes will have spin 0 and the other two will have non-zero spin. Conway and Kochen call this the 1-0-1 rule.
Spin is one of those properties physicists can’t predict in advance, before prodding. Still, one might imagine that the particle’s spin around any axis was set before anyone ever came along to prod it. That’s certainly what we ordinarily assume in life. We don’t imagine, say, that a fence turned white just because we looked at it — we figure it was white all along.
But Kochen and Specker showed that this assumption — that the fence was white all along — can’t hold in the bizarre world of subatomic particles. They used a pure mathematical argument to show that there is no way the particle can choose spins around every imaginable axis in a way that is consistent with the 1-0-1 rule. Indeed, there is a set of just 33 axes that are enough to force the particle into a paradox. It could choose spins around the first 32 axes that conform with the rule, but for the last, neither 0 nor non-zero would do. Choosing zero spin would create a set of three perpendicular axes with two zeroes, and choosing non-zero spin would create a different set of three perpendicular axes with three non-zeroes, breaking the 1-0-1 rule either way.
This means that the particle cannot have a definite spin in every direction before it’s measured, Kochen and Specker concluded. If it did, physicists would be able to occasionally observe it breaking the 1-0-1 rule, which never happens. Instead, it must “decide” which spin to have on the fly.
Conway compares the situation to the game “Twenty Questions.” If you play the game fairly, you decide upfront on a single object and honestly answer each of the questions, hoping your opponent won’t deduce what you chose. But a clever player could also cheat, changing the object partway through. In that case, his answers aren’t determined in advance. The particle, Kochen and Specker showed, is like a cheating player. They found it out by showing that no single object satisfies all the “questions” (or all 33 axes) at once.
But there’s another possible interpretation. Perhaps the particle’s spin is completely determined — but depends on something else about the state of the universe. That would be like a player in “Twenty Questions” who has decided his object is a donkey whenever his opponent starts a question with “Is,” and that his object a horse otherwise (or using any other arbitrary but consistent rule). For example, if his opponent asked, “Is it something with big ears?” he would say “yes,” but if his opponent asked, “Does it have big ears?” he’d say “no.” In that case, his answers are predetermined even though he has no single object in mind.
Conway and Kochen say that they have now proven that particles’ responses can’t be pre-determined, even within this possible interpretation. “We can really prove that there’s no algorithm, no way that the particle can give an answer that is unique and can be specified ahead of time,” Conway says. “I’m still amazed that we can actually manage to prove that.”
They concocted a thought experiment for their proof. It is possible to entangle two spin 1 particles so that their spins are identical along every possible axis and will remain so, even if they are separated very far apart. Entangle two particles this way, and then send a physicist named Alice with one of them to Mars and leave the other with a physicist named Bob on Earth. That will prevent information from passing between the physicists or the particles, according to relativity theory. Alice and Bob each prod their particles along some axis, which they freely choose. If Alice and Bob happen to choose the same axis, they’ll get the same answer.
Now, imagine that the particles are like the “20 questions” player whose object is sometimes a donkey and sometimes a horse, with a fixed rule deciding when to answer with which animal. Whatever the rule is, it applies to each of the entangled particles and will cause them to have the same spins. It’s as if the “20 questions” player has been cloned, and both players are forced to give answers for the same animal.
But Conway and Kochen have shown this scenario is impossible for particles that are incommunicado. They invoked the old Kochen-Specker paradox to show that if the spin 1 particle’s behavior is pre-determined so that it isn’t allowed to “change its animal,” it won’t be able to give answers that are consistent with the 1-0-1 rule. So if Alice and Bob are lucky in how they choose their axes, they should be able to force the particles either to disagree or to violate the 1-0-1 rule — contrary to experimental evidence.
Kochen and Conway say the best way out of this paradox is to accept that the particle’s spin doesn’t exist until it’s measured. But there’s one way to escape their noose: Suppose for a moment that Alice and Bob’s choice of axis to measure is not a free choice. Then Nature could be conspiring to prevent them from choosing the axes that will reveal the violation of the rule. Kochen and Conway can’t rule that possibility out entirely, but Kochen says, “A man on the street would say, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ A natural feeling is, of course, that what we do, we do of our own free will. Not completely, but certainly to the point of knowing we can choose what button to push in an experiment.”
Ideally, a mathematical proof settles all uncertainty, but Kochen and Conway haven’t yet managed to convince many of the physicists they are addressing. “I’m not convinced,” says Sheldon Goldstein of Rutgers University, a Bohmian. He believes the argument implies nothing new, and he’s content with the notion that free will exists only effectively (not theoretically). He and his collaborators have spent many hours discussing these issues with the pair of mathematicians since Kochen and Conway first posted their result four years ago. Their new version, posted on Arxiv.org July 21, attempts to strengthen the result in light of criticisms. Still, mutual understanding has not yet come about. “It’s kind of depressing when people can’t communicate with each other,” Goldstein says. “We know that’s true in politics, but you’d think that wouldn’t be going on here.”
But Gerard ’t Hooft of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1999, says the pair’s conclusions are legitimate — but he chooses determinism over free will. “As a determined determinist I would say that yes, you bet, an experimenter's choice what to measure was fixed from the dawn of time, and so were the properties of the thing he decided to call a photon,” Hooft says. “If you believe in determinism, you have to believe it all the way. No escape possible. Conway and Kochen have shown here in a beautiful way that a half-hearted belief in pseudo-determinism is impossible to sustain.”
My Comment: And so the question of a conscious universe is raised.
The Jews as Black Swans
Bestselling author Nassim Nicholas Taleb continues his exploration of randomness in his fascinating new book, The Black Swan, in which he examines the influence of highly improbable and unpredictable events that have massive impact.
Engaging and enlightening, The Black Swan is a book that may change the way you think about the world, a book that Chris Anderson calls, "a delightful romp through history, economics, and the frailties of human nature."
Guest Reviewer: Chris Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and the author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.
Four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon warned that our minds are wired to deceive us.
"Beware the fallacies into which undisciplined thinkers most easily fall--they are the real distorting prisms of human nature." Chief among them: "Assuming more order than exists in chaotic nature." Now consider the typical stock market report: "Today investors bid shares down out of concern over Iranian oil production." Sigh.
We're still doing it.
Our brains are wired for narrative, not statistical uncertainty.
Engaging and enlightening, The Black Swan is a book that may change the way you think about the world, a book that Chris Anderson calls, "a delightful romp through history, economics, and the frailties of human nature."
Guest Reviewer: Chris Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and the author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.
Four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon warned that our minds are wired to deceive us.
"Beware the fallacies into which undisciplined thinkers most easily fall--they are the real distorting prisms of human nature." Chief among them: "Assuming more order than exists in chaotic nature." Now consider the typical stock market report: "Today investors bid shares down out of concern over Iranian oil production." Sigh.
We're still doing it.
Our brains are wired for narrative, not statistical uncertainty.
Keynote
This blog isn’t about truth, nor is it about my truth. It’s about a discussion that I believe is quietly taking place within many people, a discussion with science on the one side and religion on the other side. It’s not necessarily an amicable discussion, our own thoughts, the give and take tete a tete in our minds. If there is any reflective relationship between our collective thoughts and society, then that dialogue is so brutal it may not even rise to the level of dialogue. Somewhere inside of us is a good old fashioned bar room brawl designed to get the other side to simply shut up.
This would be one of those psychological dynamics that takes place against our will, the same way that plumbing happens to occasionally back up, or that car wrecks occasionally happen. We would like our plumbing to be as open as the London Tube in the wee hours of the morning, our car to run silkily smooth without the need for repair, but we’re just not there yet. We know that a world of greatly reduced friction is possible, although technologically, we can’t yet live that life.
I’m going to try to facilitate a peaceful discussion between science and religion. It’s a discussion that can’t possibly end, for both are in a process of discovering the nature of the universe, and for those who say that religious texts aren’t discovering the universe, the texts are giving us the ultimate answers—then science is busy discovering the universe, the religious folks are busy trying to understand the texts. And this amounts to the same thing, everyone trying to discover the universe to their satisfaction. If you are the type of person that takes such an investigation seriously, then there is no end, there is always more to know.
So where can this meeting take place? And what shape of table shall be used?
I will let the scientists decide this, and they have, as they have published a wealth of books and been the subject of some marvelous television shows depicting quantum physics, medicine, cosmology—that is, they seem to be filling the water barrel with something I suspect we are hard wired thirsty. They don’t fill up the barrel with jargon or high ended math. They are making the complex concepts accessible to everyone with the use of metaphor. I was watching a show about the formation of the moon, and the scientist was using the metaphor of roller derby. So the meeting shall take place in a world of metaphor, all sitting at a table made of metaphor.
The odd and not so surprising thing, the world of literature, and religion is also made of metaphor. And if you think of the world in holographic or fractal terms, then everything you see can be a metaphor for something greater. In science alone, biology can be a metaphor for chemistry, chemistry and be a metaphor for quantum physics, and quantum physics can provide metaphors for cosmology and relativity. It’s not much of a jump from physics to baseball, and from baseball to spirituality—and all of these metaphors are incestuous, they can be used any which way for each other.
For instance, the Torah will speak of miracles, that is, things which don’t usually occur in nature, things which seem impossible, but have nevertheless occurred. This isn’t very different from the scientific anomaly. And so the parting of the Red Sea was an anomaly, the water from the rock another anomaly. With miracles, there is no asking why because there is no why—but with anomalies, asking why is the first step. It begins the process of investigation, which for Jews begins at the Seder, with the four questions. Jews should be investigating with the same ferocity as they do in the labs of MIT.
In other words, if you look closely, the scientific process isn’t very different from the religious process—you ask a question, you try to answer the question. Some answers not only change how you see things, they change how you see yourself, and then those answers change your world.
If you love a good metaphor, then you’ll fall into this process easily. It will be fun. And because the science world is so much like the old American West, a wide open frontier to be settled, the news and posting will come from there. But if I post it, then that means I’ve seen the same thing, described metaphorically, in some religious text---OR that the new discovery itself is a metaphor from something else.
I’ll just be like Philip Marlowe’s stream of consciousness, giving you the raw material, and then leaving you to your quiet moments with a bottle of Old Taylor and a cigarette to figure out the connections.
This would be one of those psychological dynamics that takes place against our will, the same way that plumbing happens to occasionally back up, or that car wrecks occasionally happen. We would like our plumbing to be as open as the London Tube in the wee hours of the morning, our car to run silkily smooth without the need for repair, but we’re just not there yet. We know that a world of greatly reduced friction is possible, although technologically, we can’t yet live that life.
I’m going to try to facilitate a peaceful discussion between science and religion. It’s a discussion that can’t possibly end, for both are in a process of discovering the nature of the universe, and for those who say that religious texts aren’t discovering the universe, the texts are giving us the ultimate answers—then science is busy discovering the universe, the religious folks are busy trying to understand the texts. And this amounts to the same thing, everyone trying to discover the universe to their satisfaction. If you are the type of person that takes such an investigation seriously, then there is no end, there is always more to know.
So where can this meeting take place? And what shape of table shall be used?
I will let the scientists decide this, and they have, as they have published a wealth of books and been the subject of some marvelous television shows depicting quantum physics, medicine, cosmology—that is, they seem to be filling the water barrel with something I suspect we are hard wired thirsty. They don’t fill up the barrel with jargon or high ended math. They are making the complex concepts accessible to everyone with the use of metaphor. I was watching a show about the formation of the moon, and the scientist was using the metaphor of roller derby. So the meeting shall take place in a world of metaphor, all sitting at a table made of metaphor.
The odd and not so surprising thing, the world of literature, and religion is also made of metaphor. And if you think of the world in holographic or fractal terms, then everything you see can be a metaphor for something greater. In science alone, biology can be a metaphor for chemistry, chemistry and be a metaphor for quantum physics, and quantum physics can provide metaphors for cosmology and relativity. It’s not much of a jump from physics to baseball, and from baseball to spirituality—and all of these metaphors are incestuous, they can be used any which way for each other.
For instance, the Torah will speak of miracles, that is, things which don’t usually occur in nature, things which seem impossible, but have nevertheless occurred. This isn’t very different from the scientific anomaly. And so the parting of the Red Sea was an anomaly, the water from the rock another anomaly. With miracles, there is no asking why because there is no why—but with anomalies, asking why is the first step. It begins the process of investigation, which for Jews begins at the Seder, with the four questions. Jews should be investigating with the same ferocity as they do in the labs of MIT.
In other words, if you look closely, the scientific process isn’t very different from the religious process—you ask a question, you try to answer the question. Some answers not only change how you see things, they change how you see yourself, and then those answers change your world.
If you love a good metaphor, then you’ll fall into this process easily. It will be fun. And because the science world is so much like the old American West, a wide open frontier to be settled, the news and posting will come from there. But if I post it, then that means I’ve seen the same thing, described metaphorically, in some religious text---OR that the new discovery itself is a metaphor from something else.
I’ll just be like Philip Marlowe’s stream of consciousness, giving you the raw material, and then leaving you to your quiet moments with a bottle of Old Taylor and a cigarette to figure out the connections.
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