Nice ride…

a Willis jeep

Colliding with nature’s best-kept secrets

(CNN) – Visiting a particle accelerator is like a religious experience, at least for Nima Arkani-Hamed.

Immense detectors surround the areas where inconceivably small particles slam into one another at super-high energies, collisions that may confirm Arkani-Hamed’s predictions about undiscovered properties of nature.

Arkani-Hamed is only in his mid-30s, but he has distinguished himself as one of the leading thinkers in the field of particle physics.

His revolutionary ideas about the way the universe works will finally be put to the test this year at Switzerland’s Large Hadron Collider, which will be the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.

The accelerator, estimated to cost between $5 billion and $10 billion, could provide answers to questions physicists have had for decades. Thousands of scientists from around the world are collaborating on the project at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN.

If the results confirm any of Arkani-Hamed’s predictions, they would be the first extension of our notions of space-time since Albert Einstein.

“We’re essentially guaranteed that there’s going to be something surprising,” Arkani-Hamed said of the Large Hadron Collider, which will operate inside a 17-mile circular tunnel.

Regarded as a “gem,” Arkani-Hamed is “opening our minds and creating a new world of ideas that challenge deep-grained preconceptions about spacetime,” said Chris Tully, professor of physics at Princeton University, who is working on the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.

“From the point of view of the big experiments at the LHC, there is no amount of money or craftsmanship that would produce the kind of insight that comes from sharing LHC data with a true visionary like Nima Arkani-Hamed,” Tully said.

Formerly a professor at Harvard, Arkani-Hamed currently sits on the faculty at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where Einstein served from 1933 until his death in 1955.

“He was lured from Harvard to the IAS; I’m sure that’s considered quite a coup,” said Daniel Marlow, a physics professor at Princeton who is also collaborating on the CMS experiment.

Arkani-Hamed has had a hand in explaining how the world can operate according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which describes the universe on a very large scale, and at the same time follow quantum mechanics, laws that describe the universe on a scale smaller than the eye can see.

Some of the key mysteries that stem from these clashing theories include why gravity is so weak, relative to the other fundamental physical forces such as electromagnetism and why the universe is so large. These issues come up because on an inconceivably small scale, the particles that make up our world seem to behave completely differently than one might imagine.

For example, if you are driving a car, your GPS tells you where you are, and your speedometer tells you how fast you are moving. But on the scale of particles like electrons, it is impossible to know both position and speed at once; the very act of trying to find out requires incredible amounts of energy.

If it takes so much energy just to try to pin down a particle, then, in theory, all particles should have temporary energy changes around them called “quantum fluctuations.” This energy translates into mass, since Einstein famously said that mass and energy are interchangeable through the equation E=mc².

“It makes it extremely mysterious that the electron, or indeed, everything else that we know and love and are made of, isn’t incredibly more massive than it is,” Arkani-Hamed said.

A theory that has emerged in recent decades that claims to bring some relief to physics mysteries like these is called superstring theory, or string theory for short. Previously, scientists believed that the smallest, most indivisible building blocks of our world were particles, but string theory says the world is made of extremely small vibrating loops called strings.

In order for these strings to properly constitute our universe, they must vibrate in 11 dimensions, scientists say. Everyone observes three spatial dimensions and one for time, but theoretical models suggest at least seven others that we do not see.

Arkani-Hamed proposed, along with physicists Savas Dimopoulos and Gia Dvali, that some of these dimensions are larger than previously thought — specifically, as large as a millimeter. Physicists call this the ADD model, after the first initials of the authors’ last names. We haven’t seen these extra dimensions because gravity is the only force that can wander around them, Arkani-Hamed said.

String theory has come under attack because some say it can never be tested; the strings are supposed to be smaller than any particle ever detected, after all. But Arkani-Hamed says the Large Hadron Collider could lead to the direct observation of strings, or at least indirect evidence of their existence.

In fact, by slamming particles into one another, the Large Hadron Collider may detect particles slipping in and out of the dimensions that Arkani-Hamed has worked on describing.

Particle collisions should begin at the Large Hadron Collider in August or September, according to the US/LHC Web site. Evidence of theories such as the ADD model could be discovered by 2009, Marlow said.

Data reflecting Arkani-Hamed’s work on large extra dimensions “would really provide the first confirmation in this very profound way we might think about nature,” Marlow said.

Arkani-Hamed always had a great love of the natural world as a child. Though his parents are also physicists, he considers it his “act of teenage rebellion to become one too,” as his mother wanted him to become a doctor.

He remembers being impressed around age 14 that Newton’s laws could enable him to calculate such things as the minimum speed that a space shuttle had to attain to escape the Earth’s gravitational field. He’d wondered whether scientists had reached the figure of 11 kilometers per second by trial and error, shooting things in the air until the right speed emerged, until he could calculate it himself.

“When I figured out how to do that for myself, I just thought it was just the coolest thing, that little old me, scratching away on my piece of paper, could figure this out,” he said. “From about 13 or 14, I knew that this is what I wanted to do.” 

We have Ice on Mars!!!

Mars Phoenix Tweets: “We Have ICE!”

 

 

There is water ice on Mars within reach of the Mars Phoenix Lander, NASA scientists announced Thursday.

Photographic evidence settles the debate over the nature of the white material seen in photographs sent back by the craft. As seen in lower left of this image, chunks of the ice sublimed (changed directly from solid to gas) over the course of four days, after the lander’s digging exposed them.

“It must be ice,” said the Phoenix Lander’s lead investigator, Peter Smith. “These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it’s ice.”

The confirmation that water ice exists in the area directly surrounding the lander is big and good news for the Martian mission. NASA’s stated goal for the Mars Phoenix was to find exactly this — water ice — and then analyze it. With the latest news, the first step is accomplished. All that’s left now is to get the water into the Phoenix’s instruments, a task which has occasionally proven more difficult than anticipated.

Still, this is the best opportunity that humanity has ever had to analyze extraterrestrial water in any form. That had the Phoenix Lander’s persona fired up.

“Are you ready to celebrate?  Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars!  w00t!!!  Best day ever!!” the Mars Phoenix Lander tweeted at about 5:15 pm.

Their suspicions about water ice beneath the surface of Mars confirmed, scientists and the world will have renewed interest in the outcome of the soil analyses currently being conducted by the lander.

The samples are being examined for traces of organic molecules, among other substances, but the lander does not have instruments that could directly detect life.

See the full announcement from NASA.

 

 

source: wired

Great video!!

Weezer and all the internet stars

The Girl Who Silenced the World at the UN

from: Karmatube.com

Born and raised in Vancouver, Severn Suzuki has been working on environmental and social justice issues since kindergarten. At age 9, she and some friends started the Environmental Children’s Organization (ECO), a small group of children committed to learning and teaching other kids about environmental issues. They traveled to 1992’s UN Earth Summit, where 12 year-old Severn gave this powerful speech that deeply affected (and silenced) some of the most prominent world leaders. The speech had such an impact that she has become a frequent invitee to many U.N. conferences.

A little video that literally changed my life

This has got to be one of the most career and life changing moments I have ever experienced.
It’s honest, raw and great all at the same time.

Just watch it. Nothing I say will have a greater impact than you pressing play. 

 

…Final(ly) Cut Studio 2!

What can I say. No wonder Final Cut Studio is the ultimate editing, all-in-one solution for every film maker out there. My relationship with it has been similar to, when you have some girl you can start dating but in the meantime you’ve been looking at her for almost a year and haven’t said a word.

I had Final Cut Studio 2 laying around for almost one year. Bought a Canon HD camera in Japan (half the price is always good) and shot my whole honeymoon. Bought a new hard drive, which I called “Final Cut Scratch”, downloaded the whole 180 clips from the honeymoon and they’d be laying low in my special hard drive for almost 6 months. Today I said to myself “ENOUGH!”, so I started using it around. At first (and my usual impatience doesn’t help one bit) I started to imagine what I’d like to do with it, but I was getting frustrated because I was still discovering things by myself, but then later and after some patiently researched documentation, things started rolling smoothly. After a couple of hours I was already using Motion and Final Cut Pro comfortably.

Now, and as a little kid, I’m off to bed and can’t stop thinking about finishing editing the whole honeymoon. 

I guess I deserve to watch it decently after 6 months.

Thank you Apple

 

And the best place to talk on the phone is…

I had to wait literally 1 minute to try and go up the stairway. There were 6 other people waiting ahead of me. Guess what. She stood there talking even after we managed to squeeze in to go up. Oh technology!

Macs are computers… PC’s are typewriters…

Nice video worth  checking out!

http://www.thestreet.com/video/index.html?bcpid=1078966384&bclid=1137812485&bctid=1517472316

Are you more intelligent than Einstein?

This has got to be one of the greatest discussions of all time. How do you measure one or the other? Does it even matter?

Lets check the definitions:

• Intelligence: The ability to acquire knowledge and skills

• Knowledge: Facts, information and skills, acquired by a person through experience or education.

With these definitions and intelligent person doesn’t need knowledge to be intelligent, since intelligence is an ability. So thinking like this will the following be true?:

“Einstein can be less intelligent than me, for I can acquire knowledge faster on a handful of other subjects like music and languages, that he never did”

Your opinion is truly valued… Leave a comment and digg this