Physicists Prove Teleportation of Energy Is Possible
Over five years ago, scientists succeeded in teleporting information. Unfortunately, the advance failed to bring us any closer to the Star Trek future we all dream of. Now, researchers in Japan have used the same principles to prove that energy can be teleported in the same fashion as information. Rather than just hastening the dawn of quantum computing, this development could lead to practical, significant changes in energy distribution.
According to the theory, developed by Masahiro Hotta of Tohoku University, Japan, a series of entangled particles could be stretched across an infinite amount of space. By inducing an energy change in one of the particles, the other entangled particles would change as well. Eventually, to preserve conservation of energy, the original particle would be destroyed, with its energy passing to the final particle in the chain. Thus, the energy has been teleported from one particle to another.
Naturally, Hotta doesn't present any blueprint for replacing power lines with teleporting energy, concentrating instead on the implications for studying quantum mechanics. However, with a concept this profound, the implications beyond theory are nearly endless.
My Comment: If the particles stretch across time, then we’ve got some physicists who have just proved the possibility of reincarnation. Who knew? And, we all thank you.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Joke Science
ScienceDaily (Feb. 5, 2010) — Important new research about the effects of acupuncture on the brain may provide an understanding of the complex mechanisms of acupuncture and could lead to a wider acceptability of the treatment.
The study, by researchers at the University of York and the Hull York Medical School published in Brain Research, indicates that acupuncture has a significant effect on specific neural structures. When a patient receives acupuncture treatment, a sensation called deqi can be obtained; scientific analysis shows that this deactivates areas within the brain that are associated with the processing of pain.
Dr Hugh MacPherson, of the Complementary Medicine Research Group in the University's Department of Health Sciences, says: "These results provide objective scientific evidence that acupuncture has specific effects within the brain which hopefully will lead to a better understanding of how acupuncture works."
Neuroscientist Dr Aziz Asghar, of the York Neuroimaging Centre and the Hull York Medical School, adds: "The results are fascinating. Whether such brain deactivations constitute a mechanism which underlies or contributes to the therapeutic effect of acupuncture is an intriguing possibility which requires further research."
Last summer, following research conducted in York, acupuncture was recommended for the first time by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) as a treatment option for NHS patients with lower back pain. NICE guidelines now state that GPs should 'consider offering a course of acupuncture comprising a maximum of 10 sessions over a period of up to 12 weeks' for patients with this common condition.
Current clinical trials at the University of York are investigating the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of acupuncture for Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and for depression. Recent studies in the US have also shown that acupuncture can be an effective treatment for migraines and osteoarthritis of the knee.
The York team believe that the new research could help to clear the way for acupuncture to be more broadly accepted as a treatment option on the NHS for a number of medical conditions.
My Comment: Studies on acupuncture tend to bring out the worst qualities in science, which can be corrected only by each individual. Not each individual scientist. Each regular, normal, lay person. All we need to do is buy a book about acupuncture, such as The Web that has No Weaver, and read it. Or, we can make an appointment with an acupuncturist and ask them what they do and why it works. Or we can make a phone call to an acupuncturist and ask the same questions. These are steps scientists will not take. And that’s because Chinese medicine works on another paradigm, and one thing we know about Western institutions, they will not tinker with the paradigm unless they absolutely have to. Biologists must describe everything biologically or chemically. They don’t describe things energetically, like the physicists, unless, again, they absolutely have to. So here is another in a long list of studies saying that acupuncture is effective, and explained in chemical terms. It’s just narrow minded science. It’s like the old joke about a guy looking for something on the ground of a lighted parking lot. What are you looking for, some other guy asks. My car keys, is the reply. Where’d you lose them? Over there on that dark vacant lot. Then why are you looking here? The light is better over here.
The study, by researchers at the University of York and the Hull York Medical School published in Brain Research, indicates that acupuncture has a significant effect on specific neural structures. When a patient receives acupuncture treatment, a sensation called deqi can be obtained; scientific analysis shows that this deactivates areas within the brain that are associated with the processing of pain.
Dr Hugh MacPherson, of the Complementary Medicine Research Group in the University's Department of Health Sciences, says: "These results provide objective scientific evidence that acupuncture has specific effects within the brain which hopefully will lead to a better understanding of how acupuncture works."
Neuroscientist Dr Aziz Asghar, of the York Neuroimaging Centre and the Hull York Medical School, adds: "The results are fascinating. Whether such brain deactivations constitute a mechanism which underlies or contributes to the therapeutic effect of acupuncture is an intriguing possibility which requires further research."
Last summer, following research conducted in York, acupuncture was recommended for the first time by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) as a treatment option for NHS patients with lower back pain. NICE guidelines now state that GPs should 'consider offering a course of acupuncture comprising a maximum of 10 sessions over a period of up to 12 weeks' for patients with this common condition.
Current clinical trials at the University of York are investigating the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of acupuncture for Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and for depression. Recent studies in the US have also shown that acupuncture can be an effective treatment for migraines and osteoarthritis of the knee.
The York team believe that the new research could help to clear the way for acupuncture to be more broadly accepted as a treatment option on the NHS for a number of medical conditions.
My Comment: Studies on acupuncture tend to bring out the worst qualities in science, which can be corrected only by each individual. Not each individual scientist. Each regular, normal, lay person. All we need to do is buy a book about acupuncture, such as The Web that has No Weaver, and read it. Or, we can make an appointment with an acupuncturist and ask them what they do and why it works. Or we can make a phone call to an acupuncturist and ask the same questions. These are steps scientists will not take. And that’s because Chinese medicine works on another paradigm, and one thing we know about Western institutions, they will not tinker with the paradigm unless they absolutely have to. Biologists must describe everything biologically or chemically. They don’t describe things energetically, like the physicists, unless, again, they absolutely have to. So here is another in a long list of studies saying that acupuncture is effective, and explained in chemical terms. It’s just narrow minded science. It’s like the old joke about a guy looking for something on the ground of a lighted parking lot. What are you looking for, some other guy asks. My car keys, is the reply. Where’d you lose them? Over there on that dark vacant lot. Then why are you looking here? The light is better over here.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Think of the Implications
ScienceDaily(Jan. 19, 2010) — It's not thinking in the way humans, dogs or even birds think, but new findings from researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, show that bacteria are more capable of complex decision-making than previously known.
The discovery sets a landmark in research to understand the way bacteria are able to respond and adapt to changes in their environment, a trait shared by nearly all living things, and it could lead to innovations in fields from medicine to agriculture.
In the long-term, the researchers think that scientists will be able to take the findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and use them to tailor medicines in new ways to fight harmful bacteria or to find enhanced ways to use bacteria in agricultural or other applications.
Biology typically looks at the common bacteria Escherichia coli as the model for bacteria's ability to move actively and independently, but Gladys Alexandre, an associate professor of biochemistry, cellular and molecular biology at UT Knoxville, decided to look at the more complex soil bacterium, Azospirillum brasilense.
"As bacteria's ability to make decisions goes, E. coli is kind of dumb, which makes it easy for researchers to study sensing and information processing -- essentially, decision making -- in this bacterium," says Alexandre.
It helps to understand the way that bacteria "think." Their cells contain a number of receptors, and each one affects a certain behavior or trait in the bacteria, for example where to move, how to function, even whether to become virulent. The advent of genetic sequencing means we know more about how many receptors bacteria have, and the more receptors, the more ways a bacterium has to sense its surroundings.
E. coli has only five receptors that direct its decision-making process about movement, while Azospirillum brasilense has 48, making it comparatively much "smarter" in its ability to detect changes in its environments and as a result, to make complex decisions regarding where to move.
What scientists have not known and have been unable to study until now is how the individual receptors, by sensing their environment, directly affect the bacteria's behavior and ability to adapt to their environment. Alexandre's study is one of the first to isolate and study a receptor in this way.
She and her colleagues focused on a receptor they suspected was related to the way bacteria convert nitrogen gas from the atmosphere into a form -- ammonium -- that can be used by all organisms. This ability is called nitrogen fixation and while it is uniquely found in bacteria, it is critically important to all living organisms, as it is the only way nitrogen can eventually be incorporated into building blocks of cells.
The process is carried out by an enzyme which is damaged in the presence of high concentrations of oxygen, which presents a dilemma for the bacterium, as the energy needed for the process is usually acquired in the presence of oxygen.
When Alexandre and her team created mutant versions of the bacteria without the receptor, the mutant bacteria were unable to detect where the right position in oxygen concentration was, affecting the nitrogen fixation reaction. In other words, the mutant bacteria were somewhat "blind" and could not detect the right position, showing them their hunch was correct about the receptor's purpose. But their curiosity expanded: if they were able to uncover the receptor's purpose, would they be able to out exactly how it functioned?
For that, they enlisted the help of UT-Oak Ridge National Laboratory distinguished scientist Igor Jouline, an expert in carrying out complex computations of biological systems, such as the one governing the receptor at the heart of Alexandre's research. Working with Alexandre's data, Jouline was able to generate a model of the receptor's structure and compare it to other structures on a nearly atom-by-atom basis.
This enabled them to predict which one of the more than 100 amino acids in the sensory part of the receptor is responsible for sensing the precise oxygen concentration that this bacterium needs for nitrogen fixation. It's a process that, using normal genetic techniques, would have taken a substantial commitment of hours and resources, but was made simpler and less labor-intensive by using computing.
Alexandre hopes that other scientists and researchers can use a similar technique to look at receptor sites on other bacteria of interest. She noted that the ability to work with Jouline and with the resources available through UT Knoxville's partnership with ORNL was key to her discovery.
"Partnering with Igor provided us great insight," said Alexandre. "We would not have been able to fully understand how this receptor works without him."
Alexandre says there's good long-term potential for the knowledge gained in the study.
"We see now that bacteria are, in their way, big thinkers, and by knowing how they 'feel' about the environment around them, we can look at new and different ways to work with them."
My Comment: Well, let’s see what questions arise. How about—What is consciousness? And—How far does consciousness extend? Not to mention—How is this possible? These are the questions that will slap you in the face, questions that are not encouraged in science classes. These are religious questions. Unless you are a scientist of such note that you get complete freedom of thought. Like Roger Penrose. If there is a difference between his theory of panpsychism and the first cornerstone of religion, I’d like to know what that might be.
The discovery sets a landmark in research to understand the way bacteria are able to respond and adapt to changes in their environment, a trait shared by nearly all living things, and it could lead to innovations in fields from medicine to agriculture.
In the long-term, the researchers think that scientists will be able to take the findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and use them to tailor medicines in new ways to fight harmful bacteria or to find enhanced ways to use bacteria in agricultural or other applications.
Biology typically looks at the common bacteria Escherichia coli as the model for bacteria's ability to move actively and independently, but Gladys Alexandre, an associate professor of biochemistry, cellular and molecular biology at UT Knoxville, decided to look at the more complex soil bacterium, Azospirillum brasilense.
"As bacteria's ability to make decisions goes, E. coli is kind of dumb, which makes it easy for researchers to study sensing and information processing -- essentially, decision making -- in this bacterium," says Alexandre.
It helps to understand the way that bacteria "think." Their cells contain a number of receptors, and each one affects a certain behavior or trait in the bacteria, for example where to move, how to function, even whether to become virulent. The advent of genetic sequencing means we know more about how many receptors bacteria have, and the more receptors, the more ways a bacterium has to sense its surroundings.
E. coli has only five receptors that direct its decision-making process about movement, while Azospirillum brasilense has 48, making it comparatively much "smarter" in its ability to detect changes in its environments and as a result, to make complex decisions regarding where to move.
What scientists have not known and have been unable to study until now is how the individual receptors, by sensing their environment, directly affect the bacteria's behavior and ability to adapt to their environment. Alexandre's study is one of the first to isolate and study a receptor in this way.
She and her colleagues focused on a receptor they suspected was related to the way bacteria convert nitrogen gas from the atmosphere into a form -- ammonium -- that can be used by all organisms. This ability is called nitrogen fixation and while it is uniquely found in bacteria, it is critically important to all living organisms, as it is the only way nitrogen can eventually be incorporated into building blocks of cells.
The process is carried out by an enzyme which is damaged in the presence of high concentrations of oxygen, which presents a dilemma for the bacterium, as the energy needed for the process is usually acquired in the presence of oxygen.
When Alexandre and her team created mutant versions of the bacteria without the receptor, the mutant bacteria were unable to detect where the right position in oxygen concentration was, affecting the nitrogen fixation reaction. In other words, the mutant bacteria were somewhat "blind" and could not detect the right position, showing them their hunch was correct about the receptor's purpose. But their curiosity expanded: if they were able to uncover the receptor's purpose, would they be able to out exactly how it functioned?
For that, they enlisted the help of UT-Oak Ridge National Laboratory distinguished scientist Igor Jouline, an expert in carrying out complex computations of biological systems, such as the one governing the receptor at the heart of Alexandre's research. Working with Alexandre's data, Jouline was able to generate a model of the receptor's structure and compare it to other structures on a nearly atom-by-atom basis.
This enabled them to predict which one of the more than 100 amino acids in the sensory part of the receptor is responsible for sensing the precise oxygen concentration that this bacterium needs for nitrogen fixation. It's a process that, using normal genetic techniques, would have taken a substantial commitment of hours and resources, but was made simpler and less labor-intensive by using computing.
Alexandre hopes that other scientists and researchers can use a similar technique to look at receptor sites on other bacteria of interest. She noted that the ability to work with Jouline and with the resources available through UT Knoxville's partnership with ORNL was key to her discovery.
"Partnering with Igor provided us great insight," said Alexandre. "We would not have been able to fully understand how this receptor works without him."
Alexandre says there's good long-term potential for the knowledge gained in the study.
"We see now that bacteria are, in their way, big thinkers, and by knowing how they 'feel' about the environment around them, we can look at new and different ways to work with them."
My Comment: Well, let’s see what questions arise. How about—What is consciousness? And—How far does consciousness extend? Not to mention—How is this possible? These are the questions that will slap you in the face, questions that are not encouraged in science classes. These are religious questions. Unless you are a scientist of such note that you get complete freedom of thought. Like Roger Penrose. If there is a difference between his theory of panpsychism and the first cornerstone of religion, I’d like to know what that might be.
Monday, February 8, 2010
The Brain Dictionary
ScienceDaily (Jan. 13, 2010) — Two hundred years ago, archaeologists used the Rosetta Stone to understand the ancient Egyptian scrolls. Now, a team of Carnegie Mellon University scientists has discovered the beginnings of a neural Rosetta Stone. By combining brain imaging and machine learning techniques, neuroscientists Marcel Just and Vladimir Cherkassky and computer scientists Tom Mitchell and Sandesh Aryal determined how the brain arranges noun representations. Understanding how the brain codes nouns is important for treating psychiatric and neurological illnesses.
"In effect, we discovered how the brain's dictionary is organized," said Just, the D.O. Hebb Professor of Psychology and director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging. "It isn't alphabetical or ordered by the sizes of objects or their colors. It's through the three basic features that the brain uses to define common nouns like apartment, hammer and carrot."
As the researchers report January 12 in the journal PLoS One, the three codes or factors concern basic human fundamentals:
1.how you physically interact with the object (how you hold it, kick it, twist it, etc.);
2.how it is related to eating (biting, sipping, tasting, swallowing); and
3.how it is related to shelter or enclosure.
The three factors, each coded in three to five different locations in the brain, were found by a computer algorithm that searched for commonalities among brain areas in how participants responded to 60 different nouns describing physical objects. For example, the word apartment evoked high activation in the five areas that code shelter-related words.
In the case of hammer, the motor cortex was the brain area activated to code the physical interaction. "To the brain, a key part of the meaning of hammer is how you hold it, and it is the sensory-motor cortex that represents 'hammer holding,'" said Cherkassky, who has a background in both computer science and neuroscience.
The research also showed that the noun meanings were coded similarly in all of the participants' brains. "This result demonstrates that when two people think about the word 'hammer' or 'house,' their brain activation patterns are very similar. But beyond that, our results show that these three discovered brain codes capture key building blocks also shared across people," said Mitchell, head of the Machine Learning Department in the School of Computer Science.
This study marked the first time that the thoughts stimulated by words alone were accurately identified using brain imaging, in contrast to earlier studies that used picture stimuli or pictures together with words. The programs were able to identify the thought without benefit of a picture representation in the visual area of the brain, focusing instead on the semantic or conceptual representation of the objects.
Additionally, the team was able to predict where the activation would be for a previously unseen noun. A computer program assigned a score to each word for each of the three dimensions, and that score predicted how much brain activation there would be in each of 12 specified brain locations. The theory generated a prediction of the activation for apartment based only on the patterns derived from the other 59 words. As one slice of the observed brain image from a human participant (left) and the theory (right) shows, the theory makes precise predictions, particularly about the two shelter-related coding areas in this slice (circled), where brighter red indicates more activation.
To test the theory, the team used the word scores to identify which word a participant was thinking about, just by analyzing the person's brain activation patterns for that word. The program was able to tell which of the 60 words a participant was thinking about, with a rank accuracy as high as 84 percent for two of the participants, and an average rank accuracy of 72 percent across all 10 participants (where pure guessing would be accurate 50 percent of the time).
One absent code in the study that is essential for the human species concerns sex or love or reproduction. "Our vocabulary of 60 test nouns lacked any words related to the missing dimension, such as 'spouse' or 'boyfriend' or even 'person,'" Just said. "We certainly expect some human dimension to be part of the brain's coding of nouns, in addition to the three dimensions we found."
"With psychiatric and neurological illnesses, the meanings of certain concepts are sometimes distorted," Just said. "These new techniques make it possible to measure those distortions and point toward a way to 'undistort' them. For example, a person with agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces, might have an exaggerated coding of the shelter dimension. A person with autism might have a weaker coding of social contact."
Another implication is in developing and testing domain expertise at the neural level. "We teach to the mind but we are shaping the brain, and now we can give the brain a test of how well it has learned a concept," says Just. "If an instructor knows how an advanced concept is represented in the brains of experts in that area, she will be able to teach to the brain test. We can do it for hammers and carrots right now. In the near future isotope and telomere may soon be on some brain researcher's agenda."
My Comment: These findings also tell us why Jewish education has been such a colossal failure. Key words are left undefined, abstract, and therefore do not cause the brain to react in any way. Words such as holiness, humility, nefesh, ruach, neshumah, cleanliness, sin, redemption, repentance, forgiveness, and so many others are left in ghostlike limbo that Jews, both young and old cannot connect to, like it or not, the core of who we are. I believe that an application of scientific notions of empiricism, clarity, and the historical quest to make visible what in the past was invisible is what is needed. And frequently, as I’ve shown, with non-Western concepts like life force, chi, nefesh—a simple daily scan of the science section can go a long way towards greater religious and personal understanding.
"In effect, we discovered how the brain's dictionary is organized," said Just, the D.O. Hebb Professor of Psychology and director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging. "It isn't alphabetical or ordered by the sizes of objects or their colors. It's through the three basic features that the brain uses to define common nouns like apartment, hammer and carrot."
As the researchers report January 12 in the journal PLoS One, the three codes or factors concern basic human fundamentals:
1.how you physically interact with the object (how you hold it, kick it, twist it, etc.);
2.how it is related to eating (biting, sipping, tasting, swallowing); and
3.how it is related to shelter or enclosure.
The three factors, each coded in three to five different locations in the brain, were found by a computer algorithm that searched for commonalities among brain areas in how participants responded to 60 different nouns describing physical objects. For example, the word apartment evoked high activation in the five areas that code shelter-related words.
In the case of hammer, the motor cortex was the brain area activated to code the physical interaction. "To the brain, a key part of the meaning of hammer is how you hold it, and it is the sensory-motor cortex that represents 'hammer holding,'" said Cherkassky, who has a background in both computer science and neuroscience.
The research also showed that the noun meanings were coded similarly in all of the participants' brains. "This result demonstrates that when two people think about the word 'hammer' or 'house,' their brain activation patterns are very similar. But beyond that, our results show that these three discovered brain codes capture key building blocks also shared across people," said Mitchell, head of the Machine Learning Department in the School of Computer Science.
This study marked the first time that the thoughts stimulated by words alone were accurately identified using brain imaging, in contrast to earlier studies that used picture stimuli or pictures together with words. The programs were able to identify the thought without benefit of a picture representation in the visual area of the brain, focusing instead on the semantic or conceptual representation of the objects.
Additionally, the team was able to predict where the activation would be for a previously unseen noun. A computer program assigned a score to each word for each of the three dimensions, and that score predicted how much brain activation there would be in each of 12 specified brain locations. The theory generated a prediction of the activation for apartment based only on the patterns derived from the other 59 words. As one slice of the observed brain image from a human participant (left) and the theory (right) shows, the theory makes precise predictions, particularly about the two shelter-related coding areas in this slice (circled), where brighter red indicates more activation.
To test the theory, the team used the word scores to identify which word a participant was thinking about, just by analyzing the person's brain activation patterns for that word. The program was able to tell which of the 60 words a participant was thinking about, with a rank accuracy as high as 84 percent for two of the participants, and an average rank accuracy of 72 percent across all 10 participants (where pure guessing would be accurate 50 percent of the time).
One absent code in the study that is essential for the human species concerns sex or love or reproduction. "Our vocabulary of 60 test nouns lacked any words related to the missing dimension, such as 'spouse' or 'boyfriend' or even 'person,'" Just said. "We certainly expect some human dimension to be part of the brain's coding of nouns, in addition to the three dimensions we found."
"With psychiatric and neurological illnesses, the meanings of certain concepts are sometimes distorted," Just said. "These new techniques make it possible to measure those distortions and point toward a way to 'undistort' them. For example, a person with agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces, might have an exaggerated coding of the shelter dimension. A person with autism might have a weaker coding of social contact."
Another implication is in developing and testing domain expertise at the neural level. "We teach to the mind but we are shaping the brain, and now we can give the brain a test of how well it has learned a concept," says Just. "If an instructor knows how an advanced concept is represented in the brains of experts in that area, she will be able to teach to the brain test. We can do it for hammers and carrots right now. In the near future isotope and telomere may soon be on some brain researcher's agenda."
My Comment: These findings also tell us why Jewish education has been such a colossal failure. Key words are left undefined, abstract, and therefore do not cause the brain to react in any way. Words such as holiness, humility, nefesh, ruach, neshumah, cleanliness, sin, redemption, repentance, forgiveness, and so many others are left in ghostlike limbo that Jews, both young and old cannot connect to, like it or not, the core of who we are. I believe that an application of scientific notions of empiricism, clarity, and the historical quest to make visible what in the past was invisible is what is needed. And frequently, as I’ve shown, with non-Western concepts like life force, chi, nefesh—a simple daily scan of the science section can go a long way towards greater religious and personal understanding.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Siddhartha Weinberg
The Joy of Physics Isn’t in the Results, but in the Search Itself
By DENNIS OVERBYE
I was asked recently what the Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle accelerator outside Geneva, is good for. After $10 billion and 15 years, the machine is ready to begin operations early next year, banging together protons in an effort to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang. Sure, there are new particles and abstract symmetries in the offing for those few who speak the language of quantum field theory. But what about the rest of us?
The classic answer was allegedly given long ago by Michael Faraday, who, when asked what good was electricity, told a government minister that he didn’t know but that “one day you will tax it.”
Not being fast enough on my feet, I rattled off the usual suspects. Among the spinoffs from particle physics, besides a robust academic research community, are the Web, which was invented as a tool for physicists to better communicate at CERN — the European Organization for Nuclear Research, builders of the new collider — and many modern medical imaging methods like M.R.I.’s and PET scans.
These tests sound innocuous and even miraculous: noninvasive and mostly painless explorations of personal inner space, but their use does involve an encounter with forces that sound like they came from the twilight zone. When my wife, Nancy, had a scan known as a Spect last fall, for what seems to have been a false alarm, she had to be injected with a radioactive tracer. That meant she had to sleep in another room for a couple of days and was forbidden to hug our daughter.
The “P” in PET scan, after all, stands for positron, as in the particles that are opposites to the friendly workhorse, the electron, which is to say antimatter, the weird stuff of science-fiction dreams.
I don’t know if anyone ever asked Paul Dirac, the British physicist who predicted the existence of antimatter, whether it would ever be good for anything. Some people are now saying that the overuse of scanning devices has helped bankrupt the health care system. Indeed, when I saw the bill for Nancy’s scan, I almost fainted, but when I saw how little of it we ourselves had to pay, I felt like ordering up Champagne.
But better medical devices are not why we build these machines that eat a small city’s worth of electricity to bang together protons and recreate the fires of the Big Bang. Better diagnoses are not why young scientists spend the best years of their lives welding and soldering and pulling cable through underground caverns inside detectors the size of New York apartment buildings to capture and record those holy fires.
They want to know where we all came from, and so do I. In a drawer at home I have a family tree my brother made as a school project long ago tracing our ancestry back several hundred years in Norway, but it’s not enough. Whatever happened in the Big Bang, whatever laws are briefly reincarnated in the unholy proton fires at CERN, not only made galaxies and planets possible, but it also made us possible. How atoms could achieve such a thing is a story mostly untold but worth revering. The Earth’s biosphere is the most complicated manifestation of the laws of nature that we know of.
Like an only child dreaming of lost siblings, we dream of finding other Earths, other creatures and civilizations out in space, or even other universes. We all want to find out that we are cosmic Anastasias and that there is a secret that connects us, that lays bare the essential unity of physical phenomena.
And so we try, sometimes against great odds. The year that is now ending began with some areas of science in ruins. One section of the Large Hadron Collider looked like a train wreck with several-ton magnets lying about smashed after an electrical connection between them vaporized only nine days off a showy inauguration.
The Hubble Space Telescope was limping about in orbit with only one of its cameras working.
But here is the scorecard at the end of the year: in December, the newly refurbished collider produced a million proton collisions, including 50,000 at the record energy of 1.2 trillion electron volts per proton, before going silent for the holidays. CERN is on track to run it next year at three times that energy.
The Hubble telescope, after one last astronaut servicing visit, reached to within spitting distance of the Big Bang and recorded images of the most distant galaxies yet observed, which existed some 600 million or 700 million years after the putative beginning of time.
Not to mention the rapidly expanding universe of extrasolar planets. In my view from the cosmic bleachers, the pot is bubbling for discovery. We all got a hint of just how crazy that might be in the new age of the Internet on Dec. 17, when physicists around the world found themselves glued to a Webcast of the results from an experiment called the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search. Rumors had swept the blogs and other outposts of scientific commentary that the experimenters were going to announce that they had finally detected the ethereal and mysterious dark matter particles, which, astronomers say, make up a quarter of the universe.
In the end, the result was frustratingly vague and inconclusive.
“We want it to be true — we so want to have a clue about dark matter,” Maria Spiropulu, a Caltech physicist working at CERN wrote to me the night of the Webcast.
“And it is not easy,” Dr. Spiropulu said. “The experiments are not easy and the analysis is not easy. This is a tough, tough ride over all.”
Although we might well solve part of the dark matter conundrum in the coming years, the larger mystery winds out in front of us like a train snaking into the fog.
We may never know where we came from. We will probably never find that cosmic connection to our lost royalty. Someday I will visit Norway and look up those ancestors. They died not knowing the fate of the universe, and so will I, but maybe that’s all right.
Steven Weinberg, a University of Texas physicist and Nobel Prize winner, once wrote in his 1977 book “The First Three Minutes”: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” Dr. Weinberg has been explaining that statement ever since. He went on to say that it is by how we live and love and, yes, do science, that the universe warms up and acquires meaning.
As the dark matter fever was rising a few weeks ago, I called Vera Rubin, the astronomer at the department of terrestrial magnetism of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who helped make dark matter a cosmic issue by showing that galaxies rotate too fast for the gravity of their luminous components to keep them together.
But Dr. Rubin, who likes to stick to the facts, refused to be excited. “I don’t know if we have dark matter or have to nudge Newton’s Laws or what.
“I’m sorry I know so little; I’m sorry we all know so little. But that’s kind of the fun, isn’t it?”
My Comment: The article is pretty self-explanatory, with physicists now describing their science as a type of spiritual journey. Kind of a Jewish Zen thing.
By DENNIS OVERBYE
I was asked recently what the Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle accelerator outside Geneva, is good for. After $10 billion and 15 years, the machine is ready to begin operations early next year, banging together protons in an effort to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang. Sure, there are new particles and abstract symmetries in the offing for those few who speak the language of quantum field theory. But what about the rest of us?
The classic answer was allegedly given long ago by Michael Faraday, who, when asked what good was electricity, told a government minister that he didn’t know but that “one day you will tax it.”
Not being fast enough on my feet, I rattled off the usual suspects. Among the spinoffs from particle physics, besides a robust academic research community, are the Web, which was invented as a tool for physicists to better communicate at CERN — the European Organization for Nuclear Research, builders of the new collider — and many modern medical imaging methods like M.R.I.’s and PET scans.
These tests sound innocuous and even miraculous: noninvasive and mostly painless explorations of personal inner space, but their use does involve an encounter with forces that sound like they came from the twilight zone. When my wife, Nancy, had a scan known as a Spect last fall, for what seems to have been a false alarm, she had to be injected with a radioactive tracer. That meant she had to sleep in another room for a couple of days and was forbidden to hug our daughter.
The “P” in PET scan, after all, stands for positron, as in the particles that are opposites to the friendly workhorse, the electron, which is to say antimatter, the weird stuff of science-fiction dreams.
I don’t know if anyone ever asked Paul Dirac, the British physicist who predicted the existence of antimatter, whether it would ever be good for anything. Some people are now saying that the overuse of scanning devices has helped bankrupt the health care system. Indeed, when I saw the bill for Nancy’s scan, I almost fainted, but when I saw how little of it we ourselves had to pay, I felt like ordering up Champagne.
But better medical devices are not why we build these machines that eat a small city’s worth of electricity to bang together protons and recreate the fires of the Big Bang. Better diagnoses are not why young scientists spend the best years of their lives welding and soldering and pulling cable through underground caverns inside detectors the size of New York apartment buildings to capture and record those holy fires.
They want to know where we all came from, and so do I. In a drawer at home I have a family tree my brother made as a school project long ago tracing our ancestry back several hundred years in Norway, but it’s not enough. Whatever happened in the Big Bang, whatever laws are briefly reincarnated in the unholy proton fires at CERN, not only made galaxies and planets possible, but it also made us possible. How atoms could achieve such a thing is a story mostly untold but worth revering. The Earth’s biosphere is the most complicated manifestation of the laws of nature that we know of.
Like an only child dreaming of lost siblings, we dream of finding other Earths, other creatures and civilizations out in space, or even other universes. We all want to find out that we are cosmic Anastasias and that there is a secret that connects us, that lays bare the essential unity of physical phenomena.
And so we try, sometimes against great odds. The year that is now ending began with some areas of science in ruins. One section of the Large Hadron Collider looked like a train wreck with several-ton magnets lying about smashed after an electrical connection between them vaporized only nine days off a showy inauguration.
The Hubble Space Telescope was limping about in orbit with only one of its cameras working.
But here is the scorecard at the end of the year: in December, the newly refurbished collider produced a million proton collisions, including 50,000 at the record energy of 1.2 trillion electron volts per proton, before going silent for the holidays. CERN is on track to run it next year at three times that energy.
The Hubble telescope, after one last astronaut servicing visit, reached to within spitting distance of the Big Bang and recorded images of the most distant galaxies yet observed, which existed some 600 million or 700 million years after the putative beginning of time.
Not to mention the rapidly expanding universe of extrasolar planets. In my view from the cosmic bleachers, the pot is bubbling for discovery. We all got a hint of just how crazy that might be in the new age of the Internet on Dec. 17, when physicists around the world found themselves glued to a Webcast of the results from an experiment called the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search. Rumors had swept the blogs and other outposts of scientific commentary that the experimenters were going to announce that they had finally detected the ethereal and mysterious dark matter particles, which, astronomers say, make up a quarter of the universe.
In the end, the result was frustratingly vague and inconclusive.
“We want it to be true — we so want to have a clue about dark matter,” Maria Spiropulu, a Caltech physicist working at CERN wrote to me the night of the Webcast.
“And it is not easy,” Dr. Spiropulu said. “The experiments are not easy and the analysis is not easy. This is a tough, tough ride over all.”
Although we might well solve part of the dark matter conundrum in the coming years, the larger mystery winds out in front of us like a train snaking into the fog.
We may never know where we came from. We will probably never find that cosmic connection to our lost royalty. Someday I will visit Norway and look up those ancestors. They died not knowing the fate of the universe, and so will I, but maybe that’s all right.
Steven Weinberg, a University of Texas physicist and Nobel Prize winner, once wrote in his 1977 book “The First Three Minutes”: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” Dr. Weinberg has been explaining that statement ever since. He went on to say that it is by how we live and love and, yes, do science, that the universe warms up and acquires meaning.
As the dark matter fever was rising a few weeks ago, I called Vera Rubin, the astronomer at the department of terrestrial magnetism of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who helped make dark matter a cosmic issue by showing that galaxies rotate too fast for the gravity of their luminous components to keep them together.
But Dr. Rubin, who likes to stick to the facts, refused to be excited. “I don’t know if we have dark matter or have to nudge Newton’s Laws or what.
“I’m sorry I know so little; I’m sorry we all know so little. But that’s kind of the fun, isn’t it?”
My Comment: The article is pretty self-explanatory, with physicists now describing their science as a type of spiritual journey. Kind of a Jewish Zen thing.
Friday, December 4, 2009
Religion Beats the Throw
New Research Says: Trust Your Subconscious Wiring
Humans don't make very good decisions. This is clear from the Nobel-prize winning work of Kahneman and Tversky, or to anyone who's spent any time with any humans (including themselves) ever.Now recent work at the University of Rochester confirms that the only sections of your skull you can trust are subconscious.
It's important to remember that your brain, the embodiment of everything you are and the most amazing computation device ever constructed, is a hot-wired adaptation which makes the average MacGuyver gadget look like ten years of planning with a federal budget. Your skull-meats were intended to help you club things smaller than you to death and eat them, full stop, and the fact we've reconfigured them to do a million other things up to and including building and playing pianos is nothing short of astonishing.
All the original functions work well. Things like "what's going left", "is that a bad thing" and "where do I move to intercept it" have been shown to work far better than the higher functions - someone who couldn't solve parabolic equations with drag can still catch a ball. Humans are very good at recognizing imminent danger (is that a hungry saber-tooth tiger?) but almost catastrophically bad at the abstract (should I take out a huge mortgage that I have no ability to pay?)
Professor Pouget has studied this reliable sub-conscious wiring, by directly observing neurons responsible for identifying motion to the left or right while the subject observed a collection of moving dotes. The firing of these neurons increases until, when it becomes continuous, the person suddenly "realises" the answer - once the brain has finished its processing, it hands the answer to the waking mind fully formed.
This explains an awful lot about modern society - the underbrain can easily identify physically moving left or right, but once the higher brain is asked to deal with things being politically left or right it all gets messed up.
Posted by Casey Kazan.
Subconscious study http://www.physorg.com/news149345120.html
My Comment: How many different ways has this been said by how many different cultures? This is an example of one of the classic critiques of western science, that they completely disregarded ancient wisdom as if it never existed. It was possible to simply put ancient axioms to a more rigorous test, to at least keep the questions open. But no, the ancients couldn’t have possibly known anything about life, consciousness, or the world. As a result, those waiting on science to discover essential truths have to wait hundreds of years before the ancient axioms can be said just so by just the right branch of science. I’ve always been partial to the phrasing, learn to trust your heart. This might take another hundred years or so for biologists involved in cardiac research to discover that the heart has “brainlike” qualities.
Humans don't make very good decisions. This is clear from the Nobel-prize winning work of Kahneman and Tversky, or to anyone who's spent any time with any humans (including themselves) ever.Now recent work at the University of Rochester confirms that the only sections of your skull you can trust are subconscious.
It's important to remember that your brain, the embodiment of everything you are and the most amazing computation device ever constructed, is a hot-wired adaptation which makes the average MacGuyver gadget look like ten years of planning with a federal budget. Your skull-meats were intended to help you club things smaller than you to death and eat them, full stop, and the fact we've reconfigured them to do a million other things up to and including building and playing pianos is nothing short of astonishing.
All the original functions work well. Things like "what's going left", "is that a bad thing" and "where do I move to intercept it" have been shown to work far better than the higher functions - someone who couldn't solve parabolic equations with drag can still catch a ball. Humans are very good at recognizing imminent danger (is that a hungry saber-tooth tiger?) but almost catastrophically bad at the abstract (should I take out a huge mortgage that I have no ability to pay?)
Professor Pouget has studied this reliable sub-conscious wiring, by directly observing neurons responsible for identifying motion to the left or right while the subject observed a collection of moving dotes. The firing of these neurons increases until, when it becomes continuous, the person suddenly "realises" the answer - once the brain has finished its processing, it hands the answer to the waking mind fully formed.
This explains an awful lot about modern society - the underbrain can easily identify physically moving left or right, but once the higher brain is asked to deal with things being politically left or right it all gets messed up.
Posted by Casey Kazan.
Subconscious study http://www.physorg.com/news149345120.html
My Comment: How many different ways has this been said by how many different cultures? This is an example of one of the classic critiques of western science, that they completely disregarded ancient wisdom as if it never existed. It was possible to simply put ancient axioms to a more rigorous test, to at least keep the questions open. But no, the ancients couldn’t have possibly known anything about life, consciousness, or the world. As a result, those waiting on science to discover essential truths have to wait hundreds of years before the ancient axioms can be said just so by just the right branch of science. I’ve always been partial to the phrasing, learn to trust your heart. This might take another hundred years or so for biologists involved in cardiac research to discover that the heart has “brainlike” qualities.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Science and Religion Both Land on Park Place
Stars Form At Record Speeds In Infant Galaxy
ScienceDaily (Feb. 7, 2009) — When galaxies are born, do their stars form everywhere at once, or only within a small core region? Recent measurements of an international team led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy provide the first concrete evidence that star-forming regions in infant galaxies are indeed small - but also hyperactive, producing stars at astonishingly high rates.
Galaxies, including our own Milky Way, consist of hundreds of billions of stars. How did such gigantic galactic systems come into being? Did a central region with stars first form then with time grow? Or did the stars form at the same time throughout the entire galaxy? An international team led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy is now much closer to being able to answer these questions.
The researchers studied one of the most distant known galaxies, a so-called quasar with the designation J1148+5251. Light from this galaxy takes 12.8 billion years to reach Earth; in turn, astronomical observations show the galaxy as it appeared 12.8 billion years ago, providing a glimpse of the very early stages of galactic evolution, less than a billion years after the Big Bang.
With the IRAM Interferometer, a German-French-Spanish radio telescope, the researchers were able to obtain images of a very special kind: they recorded the infrared radiation emitted by J1148+5251 at a specific frequency associated with ionized carbon atoms, which is a reliable indicator of ongoing star formation.
The resulting images show sufficient detail to allow, for the first time, the measurement of the size of a very early star-forming region. With this information, the researchers were able to conclude that, at that time, stars were forming in the core region of J1148+5251 at record rates - any faster and star formation would have been in conflict with the laws of physics.
"This galaxy's rate of star production is simply astonishing," says the article's lead author, Fabian Walter of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. "Every year, this galaxy's central region produces new stars with the combined mass of more than a thousand suns." By contrast, the rate of star formation within our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is roughly one solar mass per year.
Close to the physical limit
It has been known for some time that young galaxies can produce impressive amounts of new stars, but overall activity is only part of the picture. Without knowing the star-forming region's size, it is impossible to compare star formation in early galaxies with theoretical models, or with star-forming regions in our own galaxy.
With a diameter of a mere 4000 light-years (by comparison: the Milky Way galaxy's diameter amounts to 100,000 light-years), the star-forming core of J1148+5251 is extremely productive. In fact, it is close to the limits imposed by physical law. Stars are formed when cosmic clouds of gas and dust collapse under their own gravity. As the clouds collapse, temperatures rise, and internal pressure starts to build. Once that pressure has reached certain levels, all further collapse is brought to a halt, and no additional stars can form. The result is an upper limit on how many stars can form in a given volume of space in a given period of time.
Remarkably, the star-forming core of J1148+5251 reaches this absolute limit. This extreme level of activity can be found in parts of our own galaxy, but only on much smaller scales. For example, there is a region within the Orion nebula (Fig. 2) that is just as active as what we have observed. Fabian Walter: "But in J1148+5251, we are dealing with what amounts to a hundred million of these smaller regions combined!" Earlier observations of different galaxies had suggested an upper limit that amounts to a tenth of the value now observed in J1148+5251.
Growth from within
The compact star-forming region of J1148+5251 provides a highly interesting data point for researchers modelling the evolution of young galaxies. Going by this example, galaxies grow from within: in the early stages of star formation, there is a core region in which stars form very quickly. Presumably, such core regions grow over time, mainly as a result of collisions and mergers between galaxies, resulting in the significantly larger star-filled volume of mature galaxies.
The key to these results is one novel measurement: the first resolved image of an extremely distant quasar's star-forming central region, clearly showing the region's apparent diameter, and thus its size. This measurement is quite a challenge in itself. At a distance of almost 13 billion light-years (corresponding to a red-shift z = 6.42), the star-forming region, with its diameter of 4000 light-years, has an angular diameter of 0.27 seconds of arc - the size of a one euro coin, viewed at a distance of roughly 18 kilometres (or a pound coin, viewed at a distance of roughly 11 miles).
There is one further handicap: the observations rely on electromagnetic radiation with a characteristic wavelength, which is associated with ionized carbon atoms. At this wavelength, the star-forming regions of J1148+5251 outshine even the quasar's ultra-bright core. Due to the fact that the universe is expanding, the radiation is shifted towards longer wavelengths as it travels towards Earth ("cosmological redshift"), reaching our planet in the form of radio waves with a wavelength of about one millimetre. But, owing to the general nature of waves, it is more than a thousand times more difficult to resolve minute details at a wavelength of one millimetre, compared with visible light.
Observations at the required wavelength and level of detail became possible only as recently as 2006, thanks to an upgrade of the IRAM Interferometer, a compound radio telescope on the Plateau de Bure in the French Alps.
Future telescopes
Use of the characteristic radiation of ionized carbon to detect and create images of star-forming regions of extremely distant astronomical objects had been suggested some time ago. A significant portion of the observational program for ALMA, a compound radio telescope currently under construction in Northern Chile, relies on this observational approach. But up until the measurements of Fabian Walter and his colleagues, this technique had not been demonstrated in practice. Quoting Walter: "The early stages of galaxy evolution, roughly a billion years after the Big Bang, will be a major area of study for years to come. Our measurements open up a new window on star-forming regions in very young galaxies".
My Comment: This is one of those moments that is a bit uncomfortable for both scientists and religious people, when their questions about the world are identical. For Jews, all of this data is quite helpful because the passages describing creation are, for us, quite complex. How complex? Well, Nachmanides interpreted the first seven days with a description that sounds remarkably like the Big Bang. That is, what is written down in the Torah, the words, are distantly related to the actual meaning. Another question, given the above data about this particular galaxy, is whether time is the same out there. The implication is that it is not—since the Western concept of time is tied to the pace of planet and star revolution and formation. Here again religion and science occupy the same spot on the gameboard—as the Torah strongly hints at differences in time during different epochs of the earth. In other words, time is not uniform. But mostly, the ultimate questions of science and religion, at this stage of history, are pretty much the same. What kind of universe, by what universal laws are we actually governed?
ScienceDaily (Feb. 7, 2009) — When galaxies are born, do their stars form everywhere at once, or only within a small core region? Recent measurements of an international team led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy provide the first concrete evidence that star-forming regions in infant galaxies are indeed small - but also hyperactive, producing stars at astonishingly high rates.
Galaxies, including our own Milky Way, consist of hundreds of billions of stars. How did such gigantic galactic systems come into being? Did a central region with stars first form then with time grow? Or did the stars form at the same time throughout the entire galaxy? An international team led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy is now much closer to being able to answer these questions.
The researchers studied one of the most distant known galaxies, a so-called quasar with the designation J1148+5251. Light from this galaxy takes 12.8 billion years to reach Earth; in turn, astronomical observations show the galaxy as it appeared 12.8 billion years ago, providing a glimpse of the very early stages of galactic evolution, less than a billion years after the Big Bang.
With the IRAM Interferometer, a German-French-Spanish radio telescope, the researchers were able to obtain images of a very special kind: they recorded the infrared radiation emitted by J1148+5251 at a specific frequency associated with ionized carbon atoms, which is a reliable indicator of ongoing star formation.
The resulting images show sufficient detail to allow, for the first time, the measurement of the size of a very early star-forming region. With this information, the researchers were able to conclude that, at that time, stars were forming in the core region of J1148+5251 at record rates - any faster and star formation would have been in conflict with the laws of physics.
"This galaxy's rate of star production is simply astonishing," says the article's lead author, Fabian Walter of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. "Every year, this galaxy's central region produces new stars with the combined mass of more than a thousand suns." By contrast, the rate of star formation within our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is roughly one solar mass per year.
Close to the physical limit
It has been known for some time that young galaxies can produce impressive amounts of new stars, but overall activity is only part of the picture. Without knowing the star-forming region's size, it is impossible to compare star formation in early galaxies with theoretical models, or with star-forming regions in our own galaxy.
With a diameter of a mere 4000 light-years (by comparison: the Milky Way galaxy's diameter amounts to 100,000 light-years), the star-forming core of J1148+5251 is extremely productive. In fact, it is close to the limits imposed by physical law. Stars are formed when cosmic clouds of gas and dust collapse under their own gravity. As the clouds collapse, temperatures rise, and internal pressure starts to build. Once that pressure has reached certain levels, all further collapse is brought to a halt, and no additional stars can form. The result is an upper limit on how many stars can form in a given volume of space in a given period of time.
Remarkably, the star-forming core of J1148+5251 reaches this absolute limit. This extreme level of activity can be found in parts of our own galaxy, but only on much smaller scales. For example, there is a region within the Orion nebula (Fig. 2) that is just as active as what we have observed. Fabian Walter: "But in J1148+5251, we are dealing with what amounts to a hundred million of these smaller regions combined!" Earlier observations of different galaxies had suggested an upper limit that amounts to a tenth of the value now observed in J1148+5251.
Growth from within
The compact star-forming region of J1148+5251 provides a highly interesting data point for researchers modelling the evolution of young galaxies. Going by this example, galaxies grow from within: in the early stages of star formation, there is a core region in which stars form very quickly. Presumably, such core regions grow over time, mainly as a result of collisions and mergers between galaxies, resulting in the significantly larger star-filled volume of mature galaxies.
The key to these results is one novel measurement: the first resolved image of an extremely distant quasar's star-forming central region, clearly showing the region's apparent diameter, and thus its size. This measurement is quite a challenge in itself. At a distance of almost 13 billion light-years (corresponding to a red-shift z = 6.42), the star-forming region, with its diameter of 4000 light-years, has an angular diameter of 0.27 seconds of arc - the size of a one euro coin, viewed at a distance of roughly 18 kilometres (or a pound coin, viewed at a distance of roughly 11 miles).
There is one further handicap: the observations rely on electromagnetic radiation with a characteristic wavelength, which is associated with ionized carbon atoms. At this wavelength, the star-forming regions of J1148+5251 outshine even the quasar's ultra-bright core. Due to the fact that the universe is expanding, the radiation is shifted towards longer wavelengths as it travels towards Earth ("cosmological redshift"), reaching our planet in the form of radio waves with a wavelength of about one millimetre. But, owing to the general nature of waves, it is more than a thousand times more difficult to resolve minute details at a wavelength of one millimetre, compared with visible light.
Observations at the required wavelength and level of detail became possible only as recently as 2006, thanks to an upgrade of the IRAM Interferometer, a compound radio telescope on the Plateau de Bure in the French Alps.
Future telescopes
Use of the characteristic radiation of ionized carbon to detect and create images of star-forming regions of extremely distant astronomical objects had been suggested some time ago. A significant portion of the observational program for ALMA, a compound radio telescope currently under construction in Northern Chile, relies on this observational approach. But up until the measurements of Fabian Walter and his colleagues, this technique had not been demonstrated in practice. Quoting Walter: "The early stages of galaxy evolution, roughly a billion years after the Big Bang, will be a major area of study for years to come. Our measurements open up a new window on star-forming regions in very young galaxies".
My Comment: This is one of those moments that is a bit uncomfortable for both scientists and religious people, when their questions about the world are identical. For Jews, all of this data is quite helpful because the passages describing creation are, for us, quite complex. How complex? Well, Nachmanides interpreted the first seven days with a description that sounds remarkably like the Big Bang. That is, what is written down in the Torah, the words, are distantly related to the actual meaning. Another question, given the above data about this particular galaxy, is whether time is the same out there. The implication is that it is not—since the Western concept of time is tied to the pace of planet and star revolution and formation. Here again religion and science occupy the same spot on the gameboard—as the Torah strongly hints at differences in time during different epochs of the earth. In other words, time is not uniform. But mostly, the ultimate questions of science and religion, at this stage of history, are pretty much the same. What kind of universe, by what universal laws are we actually governed?
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