The theory of everything...maybe

I read this in the International Herald Tribune this morning:

"A concatenation of puzzling results from an alphabet soup of satellites and experiments has led a growing number of astronomers and physicists to suspect that they are getting signals from a shadow universe of dark matter that makes up a quarter of creation but has eluded direct detection until now.

Maybe."

Wow...

I have been wondering lately what makes scientists of every generation think that they will find the meaning of "it all"? When history shows that as we learn more we also learn that we were wrong before. From Galileo to Einstein we have found theories and predictions that have been debunked over time as we have new technologies to find smaller and more distant things in ourselves or our universe.

As I have blogged previously of the CERN Hadron Collider and its use to find the tiniest matter particles or dark matter, did this same concept of science take place 300 odd years ago as well, albiet in a more rudimentary means of technological practice to find the same type of results? Are we not always on that quest to find the ultimate meaning of it all?

I feel that the ultimate truth is evasive and perhaps non existent. But trying to wrap one's mind around that option is quite difficult.

IHT: "On Thursday, a team of astrophysicists working on one of the experiments reported in the journal Nature that a cosmic ray detector onboard a balloon flying around the South Pole had recorded an excess number of high-energy electrons and their antimatter opposites, positrons, sailing through local space.

The particles, they conceded, could have been created by a previously undiscovered pulsar, the magnetized spinning remnant of a supernova explosion, blasting nearby space with electric and magnetic fields. But, they say, a better and more enticing explanation for the excess is that the particles are being spit out of the fireballs created by dark matter particles colliding and annihilating one another in space."

Quite. As they said, "it is a more enticing explanation..." Are we are always looking for the romance in science. That incredible find that will drastically change our lives as we know it for another 100 years. Or are these types of findings coming at us more frequently now with the advances in technology. Won't the discoveries continually be there despite technological advances. I mean, the universe will continue to morph and change and amaze as technology does to continually amaze the scientists.

I cannot believe that we are alone in this universe. With that said, there are other specie or entities well more advance and others that are less advanced throughout the universe. If the more advanced species out there are astounded with what they find why is it that our scientists feel that they are close to finding the answers. Galileo thought the same thing...

IHT: "The new theory called supersymmetry, which unifies three of the four known forces of nature mathematically posits the existence of a realm of as-yet-undiscovered particles. They would be so-called wimps — weakly interacting massive particles — which feel gravity and little else, and could drift through the Earth like wind through a screen door. Such particles left over from the Big Bang could form a shadow universe clumping together into dark clouds that then attract ordinary matter."

This theory goes beyond Einstein and gravity. We are beginning to augment Einstein's theories of relativity. Will there come a day to which his ideas become antiquated. Will there come a day when we find that, as we found we no longer are the center of the universe, we also know nothing of what we thought we knew? Can what we know be turned upside down once the proof of multidimensions is discovered?
That would throw everything into a loop!

IHT: "The discovery of a supersymmetric particle would also be a boost for string theory, the controversial "theory of everything," and would explicate the nature of a quarter of the universe. But until now, the dark matter particles have mostly eluded direct detection in the laboratory, the exception being a controversial underground experiment called Dama/Libra, for Dark Matter/Large Sodium Iodide Bulk for Rare Processes, under the Italian Alps, where scientists claimed in April to have seen a seasonal effect of a "dark matter wind" as the Earth goes around its orbit."

I enjoy learning and reading string theory, but there will come a day that we find this is not the theory of everything. Once the multidimensions come into the frey we will need to start all over again with different rules for each dimension!?

IHT: "The Nature paper includes data from the first two balloon flights. It shows a bump, over theoretical calculations of cosmic ray intensities, at energies of 500 billion to 800 billion electron volts, a measure of both energy and mass in physics. One way to explain that energy bump would be by the disintegration or annihilation of a very massive dark particle. A proton by comparison is about one billion electron volts."

I am not discounting any of this science. I enjoy reading anything from Brian Greene. It intrigues me to the core, however, the notion that we are close to finding the "theory of everything" is as arrogant as saying we are alone or the most intelligent beings in the universe.

IHT: "Such particles are called Kaluza-Klein particles, after Theodor Kaluza and Oscar Klein, theorists who suggested such an extra-dimensional framework in the 1920s to unify Einstein's general theory of relativity and electromagnetism."

Okay, in the 1920's we began to discuss extra dimension framework. With the advent of string theory that discussion became much of the background behind the work.

IHT: "Wefel's particle would have a mass of around 620 billion electron volts. 'That's the one that seems to fit the best,' he said in an interview. The emergence of a sharp edge in the data, he said, 'would be a smoking gun' for such a strange particle.

But Arkani-Hamed said that Kaluza-Klein particles would not annihilate one another at a fast enough rate to explain the strength of the ATIC signal, nor other anomalies like the microwave haze. He and his colleagues, including Weiner, Finkbeiner and Tracy Slatyer, also of Harvard, drawing on work by Matthew Strassler of Rutgers, have tried to connect all the dots with a new brand of dark matter, in which there are not only dark particles but also a 'dark force' between them.

That theory was called 'a delightful castle in the sky' by Kane, who said he was glad it kept Arkani-Hamed and his colleagues busy and diverted them from competing with him. Kane and his colleagues favor a 200 billion-electron-volt supersymmetric particle known as a wino as the dark matter culprit, in which case the Pamela bump would not extend to higher energies.

Ok. We are close to the theory of everything...now what?



This, the 204th entry in bloggoland! Thanks for reading and coming back. I always enjoy the comments, emails and the banter!!


(c)Copyright 2008 Doug Boggs

I'm conCERNed about religious dogma...

Let me get back to the running banter, again. Another thought was...

...with this CERN concept, that I've been discussing this past week, was to create a background to show that our scientists have enlightened us throughout history of some of the ridiculous concepts and ideas that no or un-education will do to a society. Religious dogma dominated, and in some ways continues to dominate, the free thought processes of our specie. It is like a negative political advertising campaign or a fear based political administration. By breeding religious doctrines and beliefs as truth, it begins to gestate within that dogmatic audience until it becomes dangerous. There is a saying, "it matters not", to which shows that whether the doctrine is true or not, if there is enough mis or dis information that can help to create the belief structure of the doctrine, the people can be led into or to do anything. This is exemplified through Hitler and numerous others over the history of our society.

Now, don't get all up in a bundle. I'm not comparing Hitler to any religious leader. But the point is that the following of any leader must be based on fact. When one is following any administration, doctrine or theory that is based on fact all of those beliefs pertaining to those beliefs can be substantiated and proven hereby allowing the freedom to think and act clearly to those belief structures.

This is not to say that doctrine or religion should not be followed unless there is definable proof. Religion is doctrine that has no proof. All religion is based on belief of doctrine. It is when the doctrine becomes dogma and gets in the way of people being able to think and act clearly as to their belief structure. Then what happens is that people begin to rely on that belief structure as truth, when it is not. People then begin to push their belief structure or their doctrine on to others and use the dogma as their defiant means of truth. This is where the danger lies.

This seems to me to be becoming more dynamic in our system of government, when our founding fathers distinctly stated that there would be a freedom of religion. They did not state that there would be a freedom of God. But the dangerous dogmatic leaders use that to help to substantiate a cause that is not or cannot be delivered as truth. Therein leading people by misinformation.

CERN, and its new massive Hadron Collider, is not only about the splitting atoms or finding the essence of the Big Bang, but it is the continuation of educating the specie to becoming more aware of the truths to our lives, our history and of our future.

Through the scientists desire for proof and truth to their theories and proclamations, they ended up creating new sciences that are the defining cutting edge to what we as a specie know and are able to prove. This has given way to seeing beyond the capacities of what we have previously known or thought possible. This has happened many times in our history. From many others we have experienced profound new ways of looking at our lives based on proof of thoughts that have become substantiated.

In 1633 Galileo was taken to Rome to stand trial before the Inquisition (Catholic Church) for heresy. The church did not want their power diminished by the truths that Galileo was professing. It shook the dogmatic mis and dis information that the church was delivering to uneducated people of the world. The church, or the power holder and administrations of the time believed that, if the people knew more of and began to believe the truth of science to their lives and the world around them, it would begin the demise of the church as an institution.

What CERN today is delivering to people all over the world is finding new questions to answers that already exist. There will be new truths substantiated which will raise more questions as well. But, CERN has delivered a new messenger to the people for their doctrines that they will be teaching. The Internet is an unbiased messenger that has no dogmatic preconceptions as to the content it is sending to educate the global populace. The science, thoughts, discoveries of any person is now being sent instantly for the world to see, process, and rethink for themselves. It allows the commoner or the butcher, baker, or cabinetmaker the opportunity to find the proof to their thoughts rather than taking the word of an administration or dogmatic structure as rote.

When Adam Smith describes the sovereign and the trader we can see that he is discussing the rich and powerful and the poor and uneducated. The sovereign need to make sure the uneducated do not have the answers so that the dominion can remain. The Catholic Church needed to make sure that the commoners wouldn't think further so they imprisoned Galileo and made him denounce his findings that the earth is not the center of our universe or that the earth travels around the sun, and that the sun is the center of our universe.

Due to Galileo and his quest for truth we know that the sun is the center of our galaxy and not even the center of our universe. It took hundreds of more years for the people as a masses to be able to enjoy that information. Today, we are able to research information instantly and disseminate information instantly and substantiate information instantly more that we ever have before.

I will end for the day...but there is so much more to say!


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(c)Copyright 2008 Doug Boggs

Communication Breakdown for My Generation!

So, with this past week of entries, I thought I would try to bring things together a bit so you might now where I am headed with all of this. Here is one idea...

CERN was working way back when with scientists throughout the world and needed to create a system that helped people interact with each other. The isolation of distance was not allowing people to work effectively and expeditiously. This new means of communication and transfer of knowledge allowed them to get more done, become more successful in their research, learn more about their science, themselves, and others. Since then, the world has quickly become flatter, as described in the book, which I have discussed and referenced numerous times in this blog, "The World Is Flat", by Thomas Friedman.

Through, Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen and the development of the internet and the interactive browser, what has been created is a new system of global interrelations between people. New and vibrant means of communication and interaction have developed. Anyone, nearly anywhere is able to discuss nearly anything with someone else. (I say nearly anything, nearly anywhere due to the fact of governmental controls or intrusion, such as China or even the United States.) In fact, numerous people can connect with numerous other people at the same time without leaving their home or office. There are millions of global communities growing due to this fact. People are reaching out beyond the borders and walls that bind them within their country.

Part of the problem I see in America today is that our business communities, and social communities are thriving on this new way of interaction and communication, but our government is falling behind in their understanding and or use of the technology. The old world ways of education are not copacetic to this new means of global community.

How can a teacher even begin to teach the children of the 21st century for the 21st century and beyond, when the children have a more advanced knowledge of technology and its uses as practices? Also, how can a teacher even begin to teach the children of the 21st century for the 21st century and beyond without these same tools that these children already have? We hear that children today do not interact with each other like "back in the day". I disagree! What needs to be understood is the fact that the days are getting longer and the nights are becoming shorter for our world.

My nieces have a Facebook page, just like hundreds of millions of other people throughout the planet have. I found them as I have one as well, GO HERE. This type of website is designed to create community with friends, relatives, and associates by streamlining technology so that one is able to communicate whenever they want, wherever they want, on whatever they want. They have this page connected to their cell phones, blogs, other websites. For the people that don't understand this, they may feel that technology has gotten out of hand and is isolating the new generation to behind a keyboard or cellphone. The debate is that this isolation is not allowing people to connect...

Communication and community is basically who and how many can stay connected on relevant issues for their group. To be able to share needs, necessities, and ideas. We have grown as a specie from a small tribal community to a now global community. Before the telephone, one's community or social circle was defined by how many people one could come in contact with in a few days time, before the news or information or necessity for the connection became irrelevant. Today, we as a global community can stay connected to relevance continuously. These thoughts and ideas can become more relevant or change just as quickly. This emergent process of human interaction must be respected and understood by our governments, as this is obviously what our specie is yearning for and involved in.

When there are people that have created communities of friends and associates with hundreds if not thousands of members in their community you cannot say that people are unconnected.

Have you heard the saying that goes something like, "When you are pointing a finger, how many fingers are pointing back?" If one has done any study with psychology one knows that when someone is accusatory of another the accusations tend to be what the accuser is guilty of themselves. It's much like looking in a mirror...now make that accusation...Change is inevitable, and constant. Not understanding the change is what creates the wrinkles in society. This is also a constant as new and younger generations look for their own voice, to create their own marks in society. It is just that much may seem out of control to those that do not understand or embrace these changes due to the exponential growth of technology and science.

The ideas of force and not cooperation or the isolationism is putting our country at odds with every other country in the world. Remember the mirror? You see, we are reaching an apex, a tipping point in our global society. What is inevitable is a paradigm shift in human relations. The old world interactions will still exist, however will become antiquated quickly. This new style of human relations is traversing the planet rapidly, as it has been doing these past 10-15 years. There has never been anything like this on this planet before. The changes in technology are exponential. The governments still try to govern the old world ways.



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(c)Copyright 2008 Doug Boggs

Is it the Furher or Amerika?

I thought I would include this interlude into the next section of my study of the impact of CERN, Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andreessen, and the Internet have on our society today and for the future.

(courtesy of Equity Private)

Part One:




Part Two:



I will have a few of these as interesting interludes in between my multi part entry. As I got this from Andreessen, I thought this would be interesting to look a bit into the mind of Marc. I will follow with more discussion tomorrow on the topic at hand. Keep tuned and thanks!

It CERNtainly all comes full circle...

I CERNtainly find it all a bit interesting. You may have heard of the world's largest hadron particle physics laboratory or what is known in laymen terms as "The Big Collider". CERN Laboratories was founded in 1954. It was the first European collaboration of scientists from numerous countries. It is now a global scientific experiment, located on the borders or Switzerland and France, that has opened their experimental processes recently.

The instruments used at CERN are particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature.

They sent a particle beam through the system to test it, about a month ago. Due to a few glitches then needed to shut down in order to fix a few magnetic switch issues. They will restart again soon. It simply takes a long time for the 27km tunnel that traverses underground through both countries to warm up to a room temperature for people to be enter it and fix the necessary problems, to then be re-cooled to a temperature of -271C or 1.9Kelvin. This is the temperature that helium becomes superfluid. This simply means that the gas flows with virtually no viscosity which allows for greater heat transfer for the hadron particles to fly at nearly the speed of light. The particle beam is shot through the circular tunnel and floats through the helium effortlessly to finally reach a destination of collision with another particle or solid surface.

What may not be known to many about the CERN organization is that the Internet was invented here. Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web in 1990. This is where the www comes from in any internet address. The Web, as it is affectionately called, was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automatic information sharing between scientists working in different universities and institutes all over the world. It made it easy and quite cost effective (basically free) for scientist throught the world to send information to eachother. CERN is not an isolated laboratory, but rather a focus for an extensive community that now includes about 60 countries and thousands of scientists. Although these scientists typically spend some time on the CERN site, they usually work at universities and national laboratories in their home countries. Good contact is clearly essential.

The basic idea of the WWW was to merge the technologies of personal computers, computer networking and hypertext into a powerful and easy to use global information system. The first proposal for the World Wide Web was made at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, and further refined by him and Robert Cailliau in 1990.

By the end of that year, prototype software for a basic system (BASIC) was already being demonstrated. To encourage its adoption, CERN developed a 'help service' and the now familiar Usenet newsgroups were provided. CERN provided a simple browser, which could be run on any system.

In 1991, an early WWW system was released to the high energy physics community via the CERN program library. It included the simple browser, web server software and a library, implementing the essential functions for developers to build their own software. This is known as open sourced software. A wide range of universities and research laboratories started to use it. A little later it was made generally available via the Internet, especially to the community of people working on hypertext systems. Hypertext, or the http of any internet address, is the computer language which overcomes the use of simple text. This is where multiple links and connections are established and other applications and video may be run on it.

The first web server in the United States came on-line in December 1991, once again in a pure research institute: the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. At this stage, there were essentially only two kinds of browser. One was the original development version, very sophisticated. The other was the ‘line-mode’ browser, which was easy to install and run on any platform but limited in power and user-friendliness. It was clear that the small team at CERN could not do all the work needed to develop the system further, so Berners-Lee launched a plea via the Internet for other developers to join in.

Early in 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released a first version of their Mosaic browser, developed by the now famous Marc Andreessen. This was the precursor of the Netscape browser.

By the end of 1994, the Web had 10,000 servers, of which 2,000 were commercial, and 10 million users. Traffic was equivalent to shipping the entire collected works of Shakespeare every second. The technology was continually extended to cater for new needs. Security and tools for e-commerce were the most important features soon to be added.

An essential point was that the Web should remain an open standard for all to use and that no-one should lock it up into a proprietary system. In this spirit, CERN submitted a proposal to the Commission of the European Union under the ESPRIT programme: ‘WebCore’. The goal of the project was an International Consortium, in collaboration with the US Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Berners-Lee officially left CERN at the end of 1994 to work on the Consortium from the MIT base. But with approval of the LHC project clearly in sight, it was decided that further Web development was an activity beyond the Laboratory’s primary mission. A new home for basic Web work was needed.

In January 1995, the International World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded ‘to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability’.

By 2007 W3C, run jointly by MIT/LCS in the US, INRIA in France, and Keio University in Japan, had more than 430 member organizations from around the world.

Okay...why I went through this is to show the collaborative efforts that science has taken us to share knowledge and information...FREE!

I will be following this up tomorrow with PART TWO of my study of CERN, Marc Andreessen and their true effects on our global society.



(c)Copyright 2008 Doug Boggs