Hope

There should always be hope--and can be. Hope can rest on you with promise and peace. It can be as natural as the breath you take, and accompany you throughout the day. And in the darker times, it can hold you up and sustain you. It is essential for your emotional health, the confident exercise of your abilities, the reaching out for new horizons, for happiness and peace with who you are and who you are becoming. GH
  

The Quest

If you've believed in better understandings and answers (better thinking), new beginnings and endings (cycles and changes), causes and effects (reasons), that there is something right or true out there to believe in (or at least something more), then you’ve had no choice, no other way to go. You've had to keep seeking, assessing, accepting and rejecting--and moving on, again and again. GH

Neutrinos Faster Than Light? U.S Physics Funding Down, Int'l Collaboration Up?

 On September 23rd researchers at CERN, Europe's main physics laboratory, announced that subatomic particles called neutrinos had apparently sped from the lab's headquarters near Geneva, through the Earth's crust, to an underground detector 730km (450 miles) away around 60-billionths of a second faster than light would take to cover the same distance (see article). The difference in speed is tiny, but the implications are huge. 

---"Faster than the speed of light: What does an experiment that seems to contradict Einstein's theory of relativitiy really mean?" The Economist, Leaders section (10.1.11)

A foundation stone of modern physics and Einstein's special theory of relativity is that nothing is faster than the speed of light, and more, that its speed remains constant regardless of the place or moving speed of an observer. Well, now an experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has called that into question. There will likely be other experiments to confirm or deny these findings, of course. This is something they will want to be certain about because much in physics could change or be seen differently based upon the results. Consider these implications offered by the Economist article:

If the result is true, though, it does change everything. In particular, the likely explanation is that the neutrinos are taking a short-cut through one of the extra dimensions which string theory postulates are hidden among the familiar four of length, breadth, height and time. Measured along this five-dimensional route, Einstein might still be right. (It would not so much be that he made a mistake as that he did not know the whole story.) Indeed, moving beyond four dimensions in this way would also allow physicists to try to integrate Einstein's work with quantum theory, the other great breakthrough of 20th-century physics, but one which simply refuses to overlap with relativity. A unified theory of everything, including perhaps as many as 11 dimensions, would then beckon. 

Now that's very exciting stuff, at least for physicists, lots of other scientists, and those who have a rough idea of what that means for our understanding of the universe. So naturally, many would think the U.S. would be contesting the primacy of place in these research efforts, that funding would be flowing and optimism for more would be rising. But not so.

In fact, on September 30th the U.S. closed the facility and ended the work of Fermilab's Tevatron particle accelerator outside Chicago, long the standard setter for physics research on subatomic particles. In a feature story in the same addition of The Economist:

At 2pm on September 30th, the last day of the American fiscal year, Helen Edwards, a septuagenarian American physicist, will press a red switch, and then a green one. By doing so, she will kill the Tevatron—a particle accelerator (pictured above), with a circumference of 6.3km, that she helped, in her younger days, to build. 

[...] For a quarter of a century before CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began working in earnest in 2009 the Tevatron, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, near Chicago, dominated high-energy physics. It was the first machine to smash particles together with energies in excess of 1 trillion electron-volts—or 1 TeV, whence its name. This led to the discovery of the top quark, the heaviest elementary particle seen to date and the penultimate piece of the jigsaw puzzle known as the Standard Model that is the best description physicists have of the basic components of the universe. 

For a few months in 2010 it looked as though the Tevatron might get a reprieve in order to find the last (and heaviest) missing bit of the model—the Higgs boson, which is thought to give other particles their mass. That would have been a delicious victory, as the LHC's first goal is the discovery of the Higgs. In the event, though, Congress pulled the plug. 

---"So long and thanks for all the quarks," The Economist, Science and Technology (10.1.11)

But it turns out that the Fermilab may have a new lease on life in high-energy physics. Quite apart from the Tevatron, Fermilab has the capability to "whip up the world's most intense beams of neutrinos," and a new project NOVA beginning in 2013 places it in a good position to replicate the experiment at CERN's LHC, and affirm or not their recent stunning results. And follow-up neutrino research is already planned well beyond that. But the price tag will be $1 billion, and the recent budget climate raises concerns about U.S. enthusiasm for unilateral funding of  leadership research in this field again. It is very clearly another sign of America's contracting capability or willingness to lead in areas and ways this country and world once expected of us.

So we now appear to be entering a new era with a new U.S. attitude of unwillingness to dominate funding for scientific research--but it is also a time when other global research centers appear more willing to step up to more collaborative efforts and shared funding. And that likely implies a new role for U.S. physicists: being more a partner, or perhaps even a role player on a larger stage with Europe's CERN and other emerging centers leading or sharing the lead. And likely that's progress, a better, more realistic model for international physics research and our role in it. From The Economist article:

Though it may gall those Americans who would like their country to continue to go it alone in matters physical, [multinational research partnerships and funding] may represent the future. It already looks likely that the successor to the LHC, a device called the International Linear Collider (ILC), will be built in Japan (if it is built at all). Most physicists agree it would be America's for the asking if Americans wanted it, but the current Congress seems not to, because it would entail doling out half of the $20 billion the ILC is expected to cost. 

Even if it ends up on the other side of the Pacific, though, America will be expected to make some sort of financial contribution to the ILC. And the odd American accent is not unknown even in the corridors of Geneva. In matters of particle physics, then, patriotism is passé. The "E" in CERN originally stood for "European", but the organisation already boasts Israel as a member, and India, Japan and the United States as observers. Moreover, more than two dozen other non-European countries have co-operation agreements with CERN. The passing of the Tevatron may cause the shedding of a manly (and womanly) tear or two among America's physicists. But physics belongs to no one country. That said, you can bet the lads and lasses at Fermilab will be happy to grab any credit they can for helping dethrone relativity. For in their heart of hearts, even the sceptics who say they think the result from OPERA must be a mistake hope that it is not.

A new world, perhaps? Perhaps, a better one?

On the Arm of God, in the Arms of Love

Today, somehow, my heart returns to this poem offered us by the 14th-century Sufi poet Hafiz. When in a certain place with the ways of love and your relationship with God, it speaks to us as few other collections of human words can. It captures so poignantly the experience and longing for love and for God, love that cannot be found "where the Beautiful Bird does not drink," but only in a deeper, more trusting relationship with God.

From a deeper place than most of us are willing to travel, this longing, this excited elevation of one's spirit and hope is shared by Hafiz with such authenticity and authority that it blows the doors off our tepid cautions and protected places, and invites us to throw ourselves into the waiting and trusted arms of love and God.

A Tethered Falcon* 

My heart sits on the Arm of God

Like a tethered falcon
Suddenly unhooded. 

I am now blessedly crazed
Because my Master's Astounding Effulgence
Is in constant view. 

My piercing eyes,
Which have searched every world
For Tenderness and Love,
Now lock on the Royal Target--
The Wild Holy One
Whose Beauty Illuminates Existence. 

My soul endures a magnificent longing. 

I am a tethered falcon
With great wings and sharp talons poised,
Every sinew taught, like a sacred bow,
Quivering at the edge of my self
And Eternal Freedom, 

Though still held in check
By a miraculous
Divine Golden Cord. 

Beloved,
I am waiting for you to free me
Into Your Mind
And Infinite Being.
I am pleading in absolute helplessness
To hear, finally, your Words of Grace:
Fly! Fly into Me! 

Who can understand
Your sublime Nearness and Separation?

*Renderings in English of Hafiz' poetry by Daniel Ladinsky, I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy (1996, 2006).

On Steve Jobs' Passing: His 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

Steve Jobs has passed from us. The loss is both personal and national. He was so personally hands on and just chatting with us, looking and feeling for all the world like our best friend, and all the while changing that world. The biographies and obituaries are front page everywhere--as they should be. Life exacts its compromises from us all--and often that is the better part of wisdom. But looking back over 65 years, it seems to me the closer you can hold to Jobs' advice--at least at the major crossroads--the more often you will choose risk, renewal and joy rather than compromise, and be happier for it. To view and listen, click on the highlighted title below: Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams and see the opportunities in life's setbacks -- including death itself -- at the university's 114th Commencement on June 12, 2005. Stanford University channel on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/stanford
© 2011 YouTube, LLC 901 Cherry Ave, San Bruno, CA 94066

No, No; You're Thinking of Jesus

        Love this sign. Just love it.

The Bolshoi Simulations- Modelling the Virtual Universe

You may have heard of the mysterious "dark matter" and "dark energy" of the cosmos. Or maybe not--after all, it's part of the arcane lexicon of the matter and forces that compose and animate the cosmos--galactic and inter-galactic space--and drive the what, how and why questions that attend them. Complicated stuff, for most of us.

So, you can be excused if you weren't aware that matter as we commonly think of it--the matter we can see--makes up only about 17% of all matter, and only 4% of the universe's mass-energy density. The rest appears to be this dark matter and dark energy--the things now being studied to help more accurately understand and model the appearance, forces, relationships and expansion of the universe. These are the kinds of things being studied by friend and MIT professor of physics emeritus Kerson Huang, among many others.

But how do you study such things? One of the most recent and promising efforts has been the Bolshoi simulations. A recent summary article on msnbc.com introduces us to it and provides links to related sites. From the article:

If you're going to create a virtual universe, you're going to need a big computer — like the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. Researchers have just made the most accurate computer simulation showing the evolution of large-scale structure in the universe, known as the Bolshoi simulation, available to astrophysicists around the world. 

Bolshoi (which takes its name from the Russian word for "grand" or "big") took in data from ground-based and space-based instruments, including the best readings of the big bang's afterglow from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP. Then it used 6 million CPU hours on Pleiades, ranked as the world's seventh-fastest supercomputer, to crunch all that data into a virtual representation of the universe evolving over time. The time-lapse simulation occupies nearly 90 trillion bytes of memory, or the equivalent of nearly 10,000 typical movie DVDs. 

The first two papers in a series describing the simulation have been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. "A lot more papers are on the way," one of the co-authors, physicist Joel Primack, said in a news release from the University of California at Santa Cruz. 

So far, the simulation has been in close agreement with what astronomers are seeing in the actual universe. "In one sense, you might think the initial results are a little boring, because they basically show that our standard cosmological model works," Primack said. "What's exciting is that we now have this highly accurate simulation that will provide the basis for lots of important new studies in the months and years to come." 

---"How to Build a Virtual Universe," by Alan Boyle, Cosmic Log, msnbc.com (9.30.11)

And if you think that's interesting, click on the highlighted link immediately above or at the end of this post for a look at a short Bolshoi animation visualizing a region centered on the dark matter halo of a very large cluster of galaxies. Hey, click on it; it's worth the trip!

Okay, very cool, but how does the dark matter, dark energy, and all that play into this? And what do we expect the Bolshoi simulation to help us understand better?

The standard model suggests that only 4 percent of the universe's mass-energy content consists of ordinary matter — the kind that we can see. Another 22 percent is cold dark matter, which can be detected only by its gravitational influence. Physicists surmise that dark matter is made up of exotic particles that interact only weakly with ordinary matter, but they haven't yet identified any of those particles. It's the weightiness of dark matter that is thought to shape galaxy clusters into a "cosmic web," which you can easily see forming in the animation above. (Remember to go full-screen and HD for optimal effect, or check out this music-enhanced Vimeo version.) 

The biggest constituent of the cosmos, at least based on current models, is dark energy: This mysterious energy, which is thought to account for around 74 percent of cosmic density, serves to counteract the force of gravity and cause the accelerating expansion of the universe. Its existence is required to reconcile cosmological theories with WMAP's observations as well as observations of distant supernovae — but no one has figured out what it is, which has led some astronomers to look for alternative theories. 

Primack, who directs the University of California High-Performance Astrocomputing Center, said a close analysis of the Bolshoi simulation could help point the way to better explanations for the dark-energy effect. "These huge cosmological simulations are essential for interpreting the results of ongoing astronomical observations and for planning the new large surveys of the universe that are expected to help determine the nature of the mysterious dark energy," he said. 

The first paper based on Bolshoi analysis focuses on the role of dark-matter halos in the universe's development, while the second paper looks at Bolshoi's predictions for the abundance and properties of galaxies. The researchers have found that the simulation correctly predicts the number of galaxies as bright as our own Milky Way that have satellite galaxies as bright as the Milky Way's major satellite galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. 

But this is just the tip of the iceberg: So far, less than 1 percent of the Bolshoi project's output has been released, Primack said. The Bolshoi simulation computes the evolution of a cubic volume measuring about a billion light-years on a side, following the interactions of 8.6 billion particles of dark matter. A variant of the simulation, called BigBolshoi or MultiDark, was run with the same number of particles in a volume 64 times larger. Another variant called MiniBolshoi is currently being run on Pleiades. It focuses on a smaller portion of the universe with higher resolution. 

This all sounds pretty deep, but fortunately, the Bolshoi team has produced plenty of beautiful videos and illustrations that will delight even those who can't tell a baryon from a meson. For still more background about Bolshoi, check out the news releases from New Mexico State University, Ames Research Center and the High-Performance Astrocomputing Center.

If you have interest in reading the whole article or visiting other cited articles, you can click on the title link highlighted, above, or this one to the article:

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/09/30/8065274-how-to-build-a-virtual-cosmos