Bones Sci Tech

Can Old Mattresses Be Used To Grow Food?

2020-02-22T08:29:00.001-08:00

It may sound so unbelievable at first, but are old mattresses the secret to growing food-crops in the most challenging of environments?

By: Ringo Bones

Until recently, the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks about old mattresses is our looming solid waste landfill problem, but a team of scientists from the University of Sheffield are turning old discarded mattresses into “foam soils” that allows any prospective farmer to grow food-crops in the most challenging of environmental conditions. The team of scientists managed to successfully grow tomatoes and other vegetables in a Syrian refugee camp located in the Jordanian desert – an environment that’s so challenging when it comes to growing food-crops – using disused mattresses formerly owned by the refugees themselves. The idea first came to one of the scientists witnessing a few tomato plants managing to grow in the Syrian refugee camps’ discarded mattress dump despite only receiving scant desert level rainfall during the past few years.

The chopped-up mattress material is put into waste containers along with a nutrient mix. Seedlings are planted straight into the foam, which supports the plant’s roots as it grows. This method of growing crops uses up to 80-percent less water than planting into soil, the scientists claimed, and does not require the use of pesticides. It looks like a version of low-cost hydroponics was discovered by accident in a Syrian refugee camp in the middle of the Jordanian desert.

If it works in other challenging environmental conditions, “foam-soils” based hydroponics could not only alleviate the problem of disposal of old and disused mattresses, but also could minimize the food logistics of humanitarian relief organizations. Imagine if most of the food requirements of a refugee camp are grown in situ via foam soils hydroponic – as opposed to being either flown in or shipped in.

Sulfur Hexafluoride: Clean Power Generation’s Dirty Little Secret?

2019-11-22T11:06:00.000-08:00

Often used in science shows to lower the pitch of the human voice, is sulfur hexafluoride the clean power industry’s “dirty little secret” because it is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide?

By: Ringo Bones

Ever seen those science shows on TV – now mostly on You Tube – where the presenter uses a gas called sulfur hexafluoride to lower the pitch of their voices like the opposite of what helium does? Well, unfortunately, sulfur hexafluoride unbeknown to many of us, is a very dangerous greenhouse gas – as in it possesses 23,500 times the atmospheric warming power of carbon dioxide and could exacerbate the effects of global warming. Atmospheric scientists had found out that concentrations of sulfur hexafluoride in our atmosphere had been increasing during the past five years. But given it is a very potent greenhouse gas, why is sulfur hexafluoride relatively widely available that science show presenters can casually use it in a demonstration to lower the pitch of their voices?

Due to the recent rush to wean our reliance on fossil fuels in industrial electrical power generation – namely wind turbines, sulfur hexafluoride is a necessity when it comes as fire suppressant in large-scale electrical distribution systems – i.e. high capacity circuit breakers and relays. Given that the alternatives are more damaging to the ozone layer – like the chlorofluorocarbon based Halon –or prohibitively expensive when use in the scale we currently use – i.e. the inert gas argon, it seems that the electrical power industry must now find ways to minimize the leaking of large amounts of sulfur hexafluoride into the atmosphere. Worst still, like most petrochemical derived plastics, sulfur hexafluoride doesn’t break down easily in nature.

Given that the electrical power industry now has notice on the potential problems posed by unnecessary leaking into the atmosphere of sulfur hexafluoride, the due diligence doesn’t solely fall on them. Back in the 1990s, sulfur hexafluoride was used to fill the cushioning bubbles of running shoes and who knows what other consumer products, making a renewed regulation of sulfur hexafluoride throughout the various industries somewhat of an uphill battle. Maybe science show presenters must now find other more earth-friendly alternative gas to be used in demonstrations to lower the pitch of their voices. Maybe the argon gas production industry could pitch in?

The Chain Melted State: A New State Of Matter?

2019-04-24T16:52:00.000-07:00

Does the discovery of a new physical state of matter eventually prove to be useful for our day-to-day lives?

By: Ringo Bones

Even though the newly discovered physical state of matter was jokingly called “gushers” when it first hit the press back in April 8, 2019, but the study itself was supported by the European Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the work was carried out in collaboration with scientists from Xi’an Jiantong University in China, the discovery of a new physical state of matter now holds the promise of improving our daily lives. Some say it could prove useful in designing more reliable folding-screen smart-phones, etc. But what actually is this new state of matter?

This new state of physical matter allows atoms to exist as both solid and liquid at the same time. In the past, atoms in physical materials have been typically thought to be in one of the three physical states – as either solid liquid or a gas. But researchers have discovered that some elements can take on properties of two different states at once that pose a complication to that view. Previously, scientists have not been sure whether those intermediate states were their own distinct state of matter or if they just represented a transition between the two.

This latest research finally managed to clear up that dispute and point to the fact that it is a distinct state of matter now known as “the chain melted state”. And now researchers hope that it can be further examined to find more uses for the unexpected discovery. By subjecting the element potassium to extreme environments – such as pushing it up against high temperatures and pressures – were combined with powerful computer simulations to allow scientists to study the unusual state of matter.

The potassium specimen showed parts of both liquid and solid states. When subjected to those conditions, most of the elements formed into a lattice structure of the kind that would be expected in a solid – but there was also a second set of atoms that were in a liquid arrangement. The University of Edinburgh scientists in the study found that more than half a dozen other elements, including sodium and bismuth, were able to reach this state if they were put in the right environments.

Dr. Andreas Hermann of the university’s School of Physics and Astronomy led the study which is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He said: “Potassium is one of the simplest metals that we know and yet if you squeeze it, it forms very complicated structures. We have shown that this unusual but stable state is part solid and part liquid. Recreating this unusual state in other materials could have all kinds of applications.”

2019 – International Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements

2019-01-14T07:54:00.000-08:00

Did you know that 150 years ago Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleev discovered and established the Periodic System for the benefit for all mankind?

By: Ringo Bones

2019 became the official International Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements after the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed it during its 74^th Plenary Meeting back in December 20, 2017. And based on the 202 EX/Decision 43, the 2019 International Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements – also known as the IYPT 2019 – was adopted by the UNESCO General Conference at its 39^th Session (39 C/decision 60). Back in April 1, 2018, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) joined in the planning and coordination to make the IYPT 2019 to be “more visible” to everyone concerned. Well, the IUPAC succeeded in making the 2011 International Year of Chemistry more or less visible to everyone concerned back then.

1869 is considered as the year of the discovery of the Periodic System by the Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleev. The IYPT 2019 also commemorates the 150^th anniversary of the establishment of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements. The International Year aims to recognize the importance of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements as one of the most important and influential achievements in modern science reflecting the essence not only of chemistry, but also of physics, biology and other basic sciences disciplines. The IYPT 2019 is also an opportunity to reflect upon many aspects of the periodic table, including its history, the role of women in research, global trends and perspectives on science for sustainable development and the social and economic impacts of this field.

Said to be inspired by the card game solitaire, Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table of chemical elements is based on the Russian chemist’s discovery that a natural order existed among the elements. Mendeleev arranged the chemical elements according to their atomic weight and then pointed out that elements side by side in adjacent columns – i.e. vanadium, niobium and tantalum – behaved in the same way chemically. Mendeleev’s newly discovered periodic table of chemical elements was so accurate that it allowed him to accurately predict the chemical properties of elements not yet discovered during his lifetime. By the way, Dmitri Mendeleev was born in 1834 in Siberia and passed away in 1934.

Did John G. Trump Send Nikola Tesla To The Obscurity Dustbin of History?

2019-01-06T08:15:00.000-08:00

Given that President Trump had recently managed to drag his rather obscure scientist uncle with his latest climate change denying Tweet, did John G. Trump played his part in sending Nikola Tesla to the obscurity dustbin of history?

By: Ringo Bones

Despite of being praised by Albert Einstein as the smartest scientist who ever lived, it wasn’t until the mid to late 1980 – primarily through the Californian heavy metal band Tesla and sometimes not even so – where non scientists and non engineers became familiar again with the life and work of Nikola Tesla. Fast forward to 2018 where President Trump mentioned his MIT trained scientist paternal uncle named John G. Trump as the reason why he is “genetically qualified” to declare that climate change is a hoax. Politicking aside, did John G. Trump was really responsible for sending Nikola Tesla to obscurity?

John George Trump was a physicist who got his PhD from MIT in 1933. In 1942 he became Secretary of the Microwave Committee – a sub-committee of the National Defense Research Committee. When Nikola Tesla passed away in 1943 in the New York Hotel, Trump was one of the top experts who declared that Tesla’s papers were not of strategic significance despite after declassification of some of them in May 2018 that there’s a plausibility that Tesla’s famed “Death Ray” might have worked.

Before he passed away in February 21, 1985, the then US President Ronald Reagan has awarded John G. Trump the National Medal of Science in 1983. I think this was probably the last of the general public had heard of him after being recently mentioned in President Trump’s “crazy climate change denial Tweets” in the autumn of 2018. Given his sway of authority in America’s wartime department during World War II, is it fair to say that John G. Trump really possessed the power and authority to send the Croatian émigré and inventor way ahead of his time Nikola Tesla to the obscurity dustbin of history?

Professor Stephen Hawking’s Untimely Passing: An Unfinished Cosmic Business?

2018-03-30T03:36:00.000-07:00

Since his untimely passing back in March 14, does humanity’s quest to know the cosmos in its entirety died with Prof. Hawking?

By Ringo Bones

Science pundits say that the untimely passing of Professor Stephen Hawking back in March 14, 2018 – which is coincidentally the 139^thbirth anniversary of Albert Einstein – has left the world of cosmology with shoes that are might be too big to fill in. Although the top five contenders – namely Michio Kaku, Michael Greene, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Lisa Randall and Roger Penrose - might seem very able to do this, it leaves without a doubt that what Professor Stephen Hawking had worked with regards to cosmology and theoretical physics serve only merely to confirm Albert Einstein’s Theories of General and Special Relativity. But Prof. Hawking managed to achieve a bit more than Einstein’s so-called unfinished cosmic business that unfortunately ended back in 1955.

Born in January 8, 1942 – exactly 300 years after the death of Galileo – Stephen Hawking grew up in relatively good health until he was struck with ALS during his early 20s that eventually deprived him the ability to speak normally and hence the computer voice synthesizer that goes with his wheelchair that became an integral part of him and despite of this, Hawking through his academic achievements managed to become a Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. As a proponent of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, Hawking managed to further Albert Einstein’s unfinished work of unifying quantum mechanics with general relativity.

Given the advancement of atom smashers since the 1960s and the advent of string theory which later aggregated into a complex but useful mathematics known as M-Theory, Prof. Hawking’s attempt to provide a so-called Theory of Everything, which is a differential equation that describes the inner workings of our entire cosmos from the smallest subatomic particle to the largest galactic cluster seems almost at hand since the late 1980s. Although still needs further refinement, Prof. Hawking only proved that Einstein’s previous work is not that far from the more complete contemporary picture of the cosmos that Hawking recently established.

As a “science communicator”, Prof. Hawking managed to drag out the rather esoteric concepts of quantum mechanics and cosmology out of the cloistered world of academia into the general public via his 1989 bestseller A Brief History of Time and subsequent publications and TV documentary specials. With guest appearances on The Simpsons, Star Trek: The Next Generation just to name a few, it seems that Prof. Hawking managed to demystify the world of theoretical physics, cosmology and string theory to the general public and made cutting edge science now accessible even to grade-school kids.

Should The Standard Kilogram Be Redefined?

2018-01-14T05:41:00.000-08:00

Although the platinum-iridium alloy standard kilogram had served us very accurately since 1879, is there a need for a more accurate kilogram standard?

By: Ringo Bones

The egg-sized platinum-iridium alloy cylinder that has officially defined the mass of a kilogram may soon be set aside in favor of a measurement that not only is more accurate – but one that is actually defined by fundamental constants of nature in order to make it several magnitudes more accurate than anything that is used before. The platinum-iridium alloy defining the standard kilogram known as “Le Grand K”, has sat inside a hermetically sealed room in Paris since 1879 and has served as the benchmark against which all other kilograms are compared.

Sadly, the metric system’s “Le Grand K” has its failings. For one, it must be housed inside three glass bell jars in a climate-controlled room, under multiple locks and keys. The slightest fleck of dust or smudge of sweat or residue could alter its weight or corrode its surface, changing its mass. The hunk of metal is only taken out once every 40 years to be compared against similar replicas from around the world. Stephan Schlamminger, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland says:”The problem with the kilogram in Paris is that it’s so precious that people don’t want to use it.”

So for years, physicists have chased an elusive dream: replacing the standard physical kilogram with a standard inherent in properties of nature such as the speed of light, the wavelength of photons and the Planck Constant (also called h-bar), which links the energy a wave carries with its frequency of oscillation. Well, physicists had managed to replace the x-shaped platinum- iridium bar which has served as the standard meter since 1890 with the 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of radiation from the krypton-86 atom back in 1960.

Scientists could use the Planck Constant to compare the energy of a wave with Albert Einstein’s iconic E=mc² equation; in that way, they would determine mass solely through the physical constants. Unfortunately, no one has yet been able to measure the Planck Constant to a level of precision that could rival what has been achieved using the Le Grand K as the benchmark.

But researchers are making strides, and at the current pace, believe they can redefine the standard kilogram as soon as 2018. In the new study published in the journal Review of Scientific Instruments, NIST physicist Stephan Schlamminger and his colleagues managed to measure the Planck Constant to a high level of precision using the NIST-4 watt balance, a sophisticated scale that measures a weight by the electromagnetic force that counterbalances it. The electromagnetic force can then be used to calculate the Planck Constant. With this method, the NIST team calculated the Planck Constant down to an uncertainty of 34 parts per billion. That result lines up well with what other teams have calculated. A separate experiment measuring the atoms in a silicon sphere has calculated the Planck Constant down to an uncertainty of 20 parts per billion, while the best watt measurement has achieved an uncertainty of just 19 parts per billion. All of this spells good news to increase the accuracy of the standard kilogram and could eventually be used to determine the exact number of platinum and iridium atoms that have rubbed off the Le Grand K since we started using it in 1879.

March For Science: Science Versus Donald J. Trump?

2017-04-23T11:11:00.000-07:00

Even though the Earth Day “March for Science” was primarily aimed at the Trump Administration’s suppression of scientific research results, has America’s political and religious persecution of science finally reached a tipping point?

By: Ringo Bones

If you asked me, I wish that this year’s March for Science that coincided with this year’s April 22 Earth Day festivities should have been started back in 1996 to mark the moment that America’s radical right-wing Evangelical Christians started interfering scientific results of the National Academy of Science – especially ones that concern women’s health, climate change and environmental pollution. Fat forward to the election of Donald J. Trump into the U.S. presidency thanks to his “rhetoric” proclaiming that climate change is a hoax invented by The People’s Republic of China to help make them sell wind turbines and photovoltaic solar panels, many observant Christians finally reached the point of “Holy Jesus Hitler Christ, enough is enough” to have decided on this year’s Earth Day to march into Washington as a show of unity that Donald J. Trump’s Alternative Facts is no solution to global warming and sea level rise brought about by climate change due to man-made greenhouse gas emissions from industrial activity.

Similar marches also happened around the world largely inspired by the march on Washington D.C. At a demonstration in Washington D.C., Dr. Jonathan Foley, the executive director of the California Academy of Sciences, said that research was being irrationally questioned, adding that attacks from politicians – especially from the U.S. Republican Party – “amounted to oppression”. According to Dr. Foley, skeptical politicians in DC are specifically targeting science that protects our health – especially women’s health – our safety and the environment. “Science that protects the most vulnerable among us”, Foley said. In short, everyone the world over protested on this year’s Earth Day against what they consider to be an “alarming trend” among politicians for discrediting their research.

Jahn-Teller Metals: A New Form Of Matter?

2016-01-10T17:55:00.000-08:00

Given its ability to become an insulator and a superconductor just by varying the applied pressure, are Jahn-Teller metals qualify as a new form of matter?

By: Ringo Bones

Back in May 12, 2015, researchers at Japan’s Tohoku University are making a bold claim saying that they had discovered an entirely new form of matter. The team led by Kosmas Prassides, says they’ve created what’s called a Jahn-Teller metal by inserting atoms of rubidium – a strange alkali metal more chemically reactive than pure metallic sodium – into buckyballs or buckminsterfullerene, a pure carbon structure which has a spherical shape formed from a series of interlocking polygons of carbon atoms. Buckyballs, which are somewhat related to other carbon supermaterials like graphene and carbon nanotubes, are already known for their superconductive capabilities. Here, while combining buckyballs and rubidium, the researchers created a complex crystalline structure that seemed to conduct, insulate and magnetize while acting as a metal. It goes beyond what ordinary matter can do.

Jahn-Teller metals have recently created a buzz in the scientific community because such esoteric form of matter could serve as a key to understanding one of the biggest mysteries in physics that has baffled them since the late 1980s – i.e. the phenomenon of high-temperature superconductivity. Named after the Jahn-Teller Effect which is used in chemistry to describe how at low pressures the geometric arrangement of molecules and ions in an electronic state can become distorted. This new state of matter allows scientists to transform an insulator – which can’t conduct electricity – into a conductor by simply applying pressure. Could Jahn-Teller metals be used in constructing a new generation of piezoelectric materials for use in high fidelity audio someday?

Element 113 Discovered At Last?

2016-01-10T02:18:00.000-08:00

Long thought to be too unstable to be synthesized in our current atom smashers, is the recent announcement by the IUPAC serves as a true confirmation of the “creation” of Element 113?

By: Ringo Bones

In January 4, 2016, officials from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) have announced the confirmation of the discovery of not only the elusive and unstable Element 113 but also its close siblings – elements 115, 117 and 118, stating that there is now enough evidence to give them permanent places on the Periodic Table of the Elements. Given that Element 113 is notoriously located in the unstable part of the Periodic Table that it is very likely that its half-life would probably be no more than a few microseconds and this also means that they also need their respective new, official names.

By their very nature, you won’t find these four newly discovered elements occurring naturally in reasonable abundance because they can only be produced synthetically in our corner of the universe because their isotopes that we manage to synthesize so far decay in a matter of seconds or less. Their existence has been theorized but has been difficult to confirm. Until now, elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 had temporary names and positions on the bottom “Seventh Row” of the Periodic Table of the Elements because – probably since the 1980s – scientists have struggled to create them more than once for “scientifically verifiable results”.

Kosuke Morita and team of RIKEN in Japan had been credited for the discovery of Element 113 and its close siblings. He says: “For over seven years we continued to search for data conclusively identifying Element 113, but we just never saw another event. I was not prepared to give up however, as I believed that one day, if we persevered, luck would fall upon us again.”

Morita’s team has been credited with the confirmed discovery of Element 113, which means they’ve won the naming rights too. Until now, the element had been known by the temporary name ununtrium and the temporary chemical symbol Uut. The three remaining elements – 115, 117 and 118 – known temporarily as ununpentium (Uup), ununseptium (Uus) and ununoctium (Uuo) respectively will also get new names.

Previous attempts to synthesize and the discovery of Element 113 and Element 115 were reported back in February 2004 following experiments carried out between July 4 and August 10, 2003. In these experiments, the primary product was the four nuclei of Element 115 isotopes. All these four nuclei decayed through the emission of u- particles to isotopes of Element 113. But the claim has not been ratified by the IUPAC back then because of a lack of scientifically verifiable reproducibility of the results.

Ever since the discovery of Element 114 back in 1999 as the event was announced through e-mail which was then published in the April 1999 issue of Scientific American magazine by scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna near Moscow reported strong evidence that they have created the heaviest element yet, one with 114 protons and i84 neutrons, many a nuclear physicists suggest that Element 113 is critically located in an unstable region of the Periodic Table that attempts to synthesize it only resulted in the creation of more stable heavier elements of a higher atomic number. A team led by Yuri Oganesian and Vladimir Utyonkov smashed a rare isotope – calcium-48 – with a plutonium-244 target to synthesize Element 114. Element 114 lasted an astonishing 30 seconds, far longer that the 280 microseconds of the previously discovered Element 112. The relatively long life of Element 114 was taken as proof that “islands of stability” exists in the super heavy element range.

2015 – 100th Anniversary of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity

2015-11-25T15:49:00.000-08:00

With UNESCO marking 2015 as the International Year of Light and Light-Based Technologies, will the centenary of Einstein’s presentation of General Relativity inspire advances of current physics?

By: Ringo Bones

Back in November 1915, Albert Einstein presented to the world his “Theory of General Relativity” as a way to resolve another contradiction of physics not covered by his “Theory of Special Relativity” ten years before. According to Isaac Newton, gravity travelled instantly through the universe. But according to Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity, nothing can go faster than light (but there’s an intriguingly convincing work by Thomas Van Flandern of the US Naval Observatory back in the mid 1970s proving otherwise that you can also check out). To overcome these incompatible views, Einstein introduced another, even grander theory in which space and time are not empty but are instead like a fabric that can be curved and stretched. This new picture – in which gravity originates from the bending of sheets of space-time – revolutionized cosmology and gave us the most compelling theory of creation, the Big Bang.

Einstein’s Special Relativity was incomplete because it made no mention of acceleration or gravity. Einstein then made the next key observation: Motion under gravity and motion in an accelerated frame are indistinguishable. Since a light beam will bend in a rocket that is accelerating, a light beam must also bend under gravity.

To show this, Einstein introduced the concept of curved space. In this interpretation, planets move around the sun not because of a gravitational pull but because the sun has warped the space around it, and the curvature of space itself due to the sun pushes the planets. Gravity does not pull you into a chair; space pushes on you, creating the feeling of weight. Space-time has been replaced by a fabric that can stretch and bend.

General relativity can describe the extreme warping of space caused by the gravity of a massive dead star – a black hole. When we apply General Relativity to the universe as a whole, one solution naturally describes an expanding cosmos that originated in a fiery “Big Bang”.

One of the simplest demonstrations using everyday objects to explain Einstein’s General Relativity that even the youngest school-kids can grasp is the bowling ball, marble and bedsheet set-up. Put a bowling ball on a bedsheet and shoot a marble past it. The marble will move in a curved line. A Newtonian physicist would say that the bowling ball exerts a “force” that “pulls” on the marble, making it move in a curved line. A Relativist would say that the ball curves the bedsheet and that the bedsheet “pushes” against the marble. This “simple” demonstration of Einstein’s General Relativity on how gravity shapes the cosmic space-time also explains why the 1919 solar eclipse observation that shows the sun’s gravitational well curving the path of starlight and the advancing perihelion of the planet Mercury that Newtonian physics is at a loss to explain why.

Einstein’s General Relativity also shows that gravitational fields affect the flow of time – making them slow down which was only demonstrated unequivocably just recently – back in the mid 1990s - when atomic clocks were accurate enough to show the difference. Without correcting the effects of General Relativity, the Global Positioning System or GPS signals from the satellites to your receiving unit would have errors of several parts per billion – which is enough to make them useless.

Recently, one of the most grandiose experiments to test the limits of Einstein’s General Relativity was the hunt for gravitational waves. Physicists can’t yet put the entire universe on a lab bench, but experimental tests of Einstein’s theories can now be carried out with subatomic precision. Perhaps the most elusive phenomena predicted by General Relativity – but has yet to be observed – are gravitational waves. In theory, a cataclysmic event such as a spiraling merger of two black holes should produce wavelike ripples in space-time that could still be detectible by the time they reach planet Earth. Two Earth-based observatories, Advanced LIGO and Advanced VIRGO at the University of Pisa in Italy, will look for disturbances as small as a hundred-millionth the diameter of a hydrogen atom.

Ahmed Mohamad And America’s Post 9/11 Education Scene

2015-09-27T03:50:00.000-07:00

Is America’s post 9/11 education scene way different than what has come before when a 14-year-old Arab-American high school freshman gets arrested for being an electronics enthusiast?

By: Ringo Bones

During a typical Monday morning back in September 14, 2014, a 14-year-old Arab American high school freshman of MacArthur High in Irving, Texas named Ahmed Mohamad was arrested by the local police after his teacher mistakes the clock that he had worked over the weekend and bought to his class’ show-and-tell for a bomb. Later investigation showed that the uproar over the young electronic enthusiast was primarily racially motivated via the post 9/11 paranoia that is still gripping white Anglo Saxon conservative America, Ahmed Mohamad was later invited by President Barack Obama to the White House and given a commendation. Given the “politics” surrounding the incident, is the post-9/11 paranoia harbored by white Anglo Saxon Protestant America hurting, rather than helping, science education in America?

The political blowback of the incident made Ahmed Mohamad to decide that he won’t be going back to MacArthur High anymore after being singled-out due to his ethnicity. After all, there are white Anglo Saxon Protestant high school students his age that were carrying loaded assault rifles publicly in the name of the “Open Carry Law” elsewhere in Texas and nobody dared to call them as “Christian Terrorists”?

Is post the white Anglo Saxon Protestant Post 9/11 Paranoia destroying the social fabric of diversity in America? Ahmed Mohamad could be a case-in-point of this and it is also ruining the inclusiveness of science education in America where kids of high school freshmen are seeing science education as “uncool” thanks to former US President George “Dubya” Bush. Ahmed Mohamad’s exceptional abilities in digital electronics should have been nurtured given that when I was his age back in the 1980s, was still learning the rudiments of digital electronics –i.e. still learning about logic gates and J-K flip-flops.

Graphene: The Wonder Material Awaiting Commercial Applications?

2015-09-07T00:56:00.000-07:00

Even though its two discoverers already share a Nobel Physics Prize, is graphene that wonder material that’s desperately seeking commercial applications?

By: Ringo Bones

Even though the properties of this so-called wonder material is already familiar to materials researchers as far back as 1947, it wasn’t until the 1970s that two Manchester University physicists, Prof. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov developed a method to consistently synthesize the one-atom-thick-carbon wonder material now known as graphene, which eventually allowed them to share the 2010 Nobel Physics Prize. Given that it is 207 times stronger than steel and is a very good conductor of heat and electricity, the wonder material grapheme has defied commercial exploitation because of a lack of an economically viable way to synthesize and manufacture it, until now.

Known as the “first lady of graphene”, Catharine Paukner, CEO and founder of Cambridge Nanosystems had recently developed an economically viable method to produce graphene on a mass scale. Using methane extracted from communal landfills and cow flatulence, Paukner has managed to convert this potent greenhouse gas (one molecule methane has 25 times the greenhouse warming effect of a single molecule of carbon dioxide) into something useful – the famed wonder material graphene.

Already in the planning stage, Catharine Paukner’s large-scale methane to graphene plant, based on the workings of a domestic kitchen microwave oven, will be able to produce 5-metric tons of graphene a year. As a wonder material with hundreds of potential very lucrative commercial uses since it was extensively studied in the past 25 years, graphene still elude practical everyday applications due to the difficulty of producing it in quantity at a cost-effective manner. Ultra-light carbon composites more than 200 times stronger than steel for electric powered aircraft applications and replacement body parts are just some of the commercial applications that could make graphene production a potential multi-billion dollar a year industry.

Homer Simpson: Brilliant Theoretical Physicist?

2015-03-29T01:49:00.000-07:00

Even though the world-renowned patriarch of The Simpsons is a well-known bumbling oaf, but did you know that Homer Simpson, at one time, exhibited his genius as a "theoretical physicist"?

By: Ringo Bones

Though he is more well-known as a dunce and a bumbling oaf, Homer Simpson – a world-renown animated character often used by its creators to assess the prevailing zeitgeist – once displayed his mathematical genius and even predicted the mass of the Higgs Boson to within more than 90-percent accuracy 14 years before it was confirmed by a team of particle physicists operating CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. To the curious, this was from an episode titled “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace” where Homer Simpson got envious of Thomas Alva Edison and tries to out-invent the “Wizard of Menlo Park”. Does this mean that Homer Simpson is now in hallowed company with Peter Higgs?

The episode would have been forgotten and would have languished in some obscure footnote of 20^th Century history if not for Dr. Simon Singh who wrote a book back in 2013 titled “The Simpsons And Their Mathematical Secrets” that included a spotlight on the 1998 episode “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace” when Homer becomes “obsessed” with Thomas Alva Edison and decides to become an inventor. A scene in that particular The Simpsons episode script required a reading glasses-clad Homer to be placed in front of a chalkboard with complex mathematical equations. One of the writers on staff had a physicist friend who was researching the then-theoretical Higgs Boson particle and needed a “scientifically believable” illustration of Homer dabbling with a complex mathematical equation predicting the mass of the Higgs Boson particle – which is also known as the “God Particle”.

“That particular equation - as shown on TV on that particular 1998 The Simpsons episode – predicts the mass of the Higgs Boson” says Dr. Simon Singh. “If you work it out, you get the mass of the Higgs Boson that’s only a bit larger than the nano-mass of a Higgs Boson actually is. It is kind of amazing as Homer makes the prediction 14 years before it was discovered” (in the CERN’s Large Hadron Collider). For those super interested, the Higgs Boson particle was discovered to have a mass of 126 GeV.

The Higgs Boson particle is the “visible” that interacts with the Higgs Field – just like gravitons do with the gravitational field. The Higgs Field is an energy force that permeates across the universe that gives baryonic matter mass and allows the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force to co-exist in the “Standard Model” of how we think, so far, on how universal molecular physics work.
Even though Homer’s mathematical musings on the Higgs Boson somewhat reminds me of 1984 Nobel Physics Prize winner Carlo Rubbia’s mathematical musings that was pictured on a 1990 era Time magazine, the field of particle physics / quantum mechanics, mathematics can be a very useful tool in discovering and describing an “unknown particle” with better than 90-percent accuracy. Back in 1962, a then 32 year old Caltech physicist named Murray Gell-Mann proposed a search for a then theoretical particle called the Omega Minus. The particle’s existence was mathematically predicted by the Standard Model, Gell-Mann argued by a theory he formulated himself and by another physicist – a then 37 year old former Israeli Army officer named Yuval Ne’eman.

This theory which Gell-Mann called “The Eightfold Way” was based on an obscure mathematical system invented in the 19^th Century in order to manipulate numbers in groups of eight since each interacting nuclear particle had eight quantum numbers how subatomic baryons and mesons are organized into octets. Independently, Ne’eman did the same. Eventually, Gell-Mann was awarded the 1969 Nobel Physics Prize for his work on elementary particles and by 1971 began work in search for a then unknown family of particles called “quarks” using "The Eightfold Way".

Is The Force Of Gravity Weakening?

2014-11-05T03:06:00.000-08:00

Even though gravity is still the least understood of the four fundamental forces of our universe, is there any evidence that the force of gravity is actually getting weaker?

By: Ringo Bones

When compared to the other fundamental forces of the universe – i.e. the strong and weak forces and the electromagnetic force, the force of gravity is currently the least understood. Until the results of the experiments done at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN makes us gain a handle on String Theory, Albert Einstein’s Theory General of Relativity is the best one yet explaining how gravity works. But is there any evidence that the force of gravity is actually getting weaker?

There have been many challenges to Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity since its presentation in 1916 – all of them unsuccessful. But that record did not daunt astronomer Thomas C. Van Flandern a researcher at the US Naval Observatory, who back in 1974 found evidence of what he believes is the gradual weakening of gravity, a force that according to General Relativity never varies.

Van Flandern’s evidence is based on the motion of celestial objects, which would be affected by a change in gravitational force. By studying the precise times that the moon has blocked from view various stars over the past 19 years, Van Flandern calculated the changes in the moon’s orbital velocity. The rate, Van Flandern said, was twice the amount of slowdown that would be expected from known causes, principally the mutual tugs of the tides on earth and moon. The difference could be accounted for by a decrease of the force of gravity of one part in 10-billion per year.

A discrepancy in the changes in the earth’s rotation, also caused by the tidal effects, could similarly be explained by a decrease in gravitational force, according to Van Flandern. The same gradual phenomenon may even account for a gradual increase in the size of the earth and thus explain such geological phenomena as sea-floor spreading and the movements of crustal plates.

Thomas Van Flandern is not the only one who finds Einstein’s General Relativity wanting. The late physicist Paul Dirac also conjectured that that the universal force of gravity is slowly decreasing. And the idea that the universal force of gravity is gradually decreasing even gave the idea to science writer Robert Schadewald who back in April 1978 wrote an article about his “Schadewald Gravity Engine” the first true working energy generating device that works on the principle of perpetual motion.

Chemically Dehydrating Seeds: Longest Botanical Experiment Ever?

2014-11-04T03:51:00.000-08:00

Even though the results of this experiments now guides us in effectively storing seeds in the Svalbard Doomsday Vault, is Dr. Fritz Went’s chemically dehydrated seeds experiment now the longest ongoing botanical experiment ever?

By: Ringo Bones

This botanical experiment started back in 1947 in order to find out how long humanity can store seeds slated for future germination in a farming field in the far-off future and was intended to last for 300 years. But does the chemically dehydrated seed experiment that was started by Dr. Fritz Went still the current holder for the longest ongoing botanical experiment ever?

Ordinarily, seeds can be stored for only one or two years before humidity makes them dissipate their stored energy and they will no longer germinate. Those seeds with firm, hard coats retain their viability longest and most seeds keep best when stored in dry storage at low temperatures like that in the current Svalbard Doomsday Vault seed repository. Under such favorable conditions, seeds of common farm and garden plants have lasted from 10 to 25 years. Would these seeds last even longer if kept completely dry?

Seeking to find out the answer, Dr. Fritz Went launched an experiment back in 1947 which is designed to continue for more than 300 years. Seeds of 120 California wild plants were chemically dehydrated in a vacuum and then the seeds of each species were divided among 20 vacuum-sealed tubes and stored in dated jars that stated their date of germination, some as far as into 2307 A.D. Since the start of the experiment, seeds from the four sets of tubes have been germinated. The results: so far the test seeds have proved on average to be viable after 10 years’ storage as they were immediately after drying.

During the experiment, Dr. Went shelves 20 identical sets of seeds according to date of future use. For each tube, 60 to 100 seeds will be remoistened at a temperature of 18 degrees Celsius to start germination. Some seeds from each tube will be raised for future comparison of the revived plants with their wild descendents. And such procedure invented in 1947 would then be applied to the seeds that are stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault - also known to "pessimists" as the Doomsday Vault - located halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole.

Mishap At The Reno Discovery Museum?

2014-09-05T12:25:00.000-07:00

Even though we have achieved so much advancement in the field of science and technology, can a routine science experiment still go awry in this day and age?

By: Ringo Bones

Back in Thursday, September 4, 2014, a supposedly “routine” tornado simulation demonstration in the Tommy Lee Wells Discovery Museum in Reno, Nevada unexpectedly turned into a flash fire that resulted in the injury of kids on a field trip. Even though the flash fire looked quite dramatic on the mobile phone video camera that captured it and resulted in the injury of some kids watching close to the science experiment, the quick response of the Reno Fire Department averted a major disaster that would have gutted the entire museum. Given how far we have advanced in the field of science and technology, does mishaps like these still a possibility in supposedly routine science experiments this day and age?

Employee error was blamed for the incident and the museum attendant who initiated the experiment is now on administrative leave after initial investigation revealed that the attendant skipped a step and an ingredient that resulted in a dramatic flash fire on a supposedly routine tornado simulation experiment. The tornado experiment at the Discovery Museum in Reno had been a routine attraction to elementary school kids on their field trip since the museum set up shop. It might have been a rare mishap given that the years since the museum opened, such accidents had never ever happened.

13 people were injured in a flash fire, including 8 children. Bill Nye the Science Guy recently demonstrated the tornado experiment on his show and points out the danger of the ethyl alcohol and cotton used at the experiment as the step with the most potential to initiate in a dramatic flash fire with a high potential for injury to the experimenter and the spectators.

Jamie Edwards: Youngest Fusioneer Ever?

2014-04-21T07:29:00.001-07:00

While competing with an American who created a proof of concept fusion power plant, is the 13 year old British student Jamie Edwards now the world’s youngest fusion energy pioneer?

By: Ringo Bones

A month ago, a 13 year old student from Preston, England using the money he saved from his own allowance managed to build a proof of concept fusion power plant as his own school science project. Jamie Edwards fast tracked his fusion power plant project back in December 2012 after hearing that a 14 year old American student is planning to do the same - thus becoming the youngest person ever to perform an actual proof of concept fusion power generation experiment.

When he turned on his fusion power plant in the classroom of his school, Sue Edwards – Jamie’s Mother – and other students sensibly fled the room for safety reasons. Even though experts had been foreseeing gene manipulation projects will be commonplace as middle-school and high-school science projects by the 21^st Century, Jamie Edwards fusion power plant seems to have been bucking the trend given that nuclear science projects has always been hard to do when done on a “shoestring” budget. And for his next school science project, Jamie Edwards plans a scaled down version of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. With his achievement, Jamie Edwards has recently become a guest on The Late Show With David Letterman.

Transistor Radio Turns 60 in 2014

2014-02-18T02:49:00.000-08:00

The lowly battery-operated transistor radio may only be useful today when a calamity suddenly interrupts our mains AC, but is the transistor radio the intrepid witness of history in the post World War II half of the 20^th Century?

By: Ringo Bones

This 2014, the “lowly” battery operated tabletop transistor radio will be celebrating its 60^th Anniversary. Often seen as the intrepid witness of the mid 20^th Century portion of the Cold War and onwards, the transistor radio set’s contribution to the latter half of the 20^th Century seems to be – more often than not – somewhat overlooked. As the Cold War starts to heat up a little back in 1954, America’s consumer electronic manufacturers managed to use the solid state semiconductor transistor device that was developed by Bell Labs back in 1947 into an “affordable” battery operated transistor radio set. Even though the first sets were priced between 50 to 90 US dollars back then (close to 1,000 US dollars in today’s money) it helped made post World War II popular music - as in Rock N’ Roll music – “go viral” like the Sputnik scare with artists as diverse as Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Ritchie Valens and other pioneering Rock N’ Roll musicians.

As the Cold War further heated up, transistor radios started sporting two tiny triangles on their radio dials at the 640-kHz and 1240-kHz points based on the American Civil Defense logo and marked the two as the CONELRAD stations – that then awkward acronym that stood for Control of Electromagnetic Radiation. As part of the scenario scheduled to unfold in the event of a thermonuclear attack by the then Soviet Union, television station transmitters would go dark and non-essential radio stations virtually silent. Only the CONELRAD stations would operate and they would transmit emergency instructions at low transmitter power – a tactic meant to keep enemy aircraft crews, mainly Soviet era strategic bombers, from homing in on signals of known higher-powered stations and using them to navigate to their strategic bombing targets. CONELRAD lasted from 1951 to 1963, when the Emergency Broadcast System replaced it.

Transistor radio sets offered increased portability over their vacuum tube counterparts due to more efficient operation and lower voltage requirements – though the transistor radio’s sound quality improvements will come a little later. Despite what the Madison Avenue admen might want you to believe back then, transistors radios weren’t quite as small as their manufacturers might want you to believe. When the Japanese made Sony TR-63 pocket transistor radio arrived in the United States back in 1957, it was billed as a “shirt-pocket” transistor radio, but because it was actually a tad bigger than that, Sony’s American affiliates had shirts with oversized pockets tailored for their own salesmen.

Strangelets: Doomsday Matter?

2013-10-26T06:06:00.000-07:00

Predicted by physicists as a “strange” form of matter that might be created in high energy particle experiments and freak cosmic events, could strangelet particles be the death knell of the entire known Universe?

By: Ringo Bones

Forget the super powerful mini black holes that could have been created on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN that would have supposedly migrated into the core of planet Earth causing it to implode in a matter of minutes. As far back as 1999, doomsday prophets have been warning us that strangelet particles would be the death knell of the entire known Universe. But what are strangelet particles anyway?

Stangelet particles / strangelets or strange matter had been theorized by high energy physicists since the dramatic advances of particle accelerator technology – i.e. very high energy yields – since the start of the 1970s. Some researchers believe that ion smashups in a powerful enough particle accelerator could create a new form of matter called strangelets. These subatomic bundles could theoretically created when three species of quarks combine: the common “up” and “down” quarks that are the building blocks of protons and neutrons and the rarer “strange” quarks that are found in short-lived particles such as Kaons.

So far at the time of writing this blog, scientists have yet to observe an actual strangelet in nature, so they can only guess at its properties. The most dangerous possibility would be the creation of a stable or long-lived strangelet with a negative charge. This type of strangelet would not act like ordinary negatively charged particle; it would grow rapidly by gobbling up all positively charged atomic nuclei that it encountered. Such a voracious beast known as “strange matter” could consume our planet as effectively as a black hole could. But should we be worried about “strange matter” rampaging across our Universe?

According to Robert L. Jaffe, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that strangelets can only be produced under conditions of extremely high pressure and extremely low temperature. Jaffe says: “It is effectively impossible to make them in the ion collider we currently have.” And he also said that “The only place where it could happen is in a core of a neutron star.”Fortunately, cores of typical neutron stars are never just a few thousandths of a degree Kelvin above absolute zero.

Todd Akin’s Junk Science Destroying America?

2012-08-27T05:29:00.001-07:00

Given the Missouri Republican congressman’s recent televised “junk science” explanation of “legitimate rape”, is Todd Akin’s junk science now poised to destroy America?

By: Ringo Bones

A number of US Republican Party insiders even started confessed that the current GOP is a wholly different beast from what it is during the days of Ronald Reagan. With party regulars resorting to demagoguery and organized Christian dogma rather than reasoned argument and science to justify their being beholden to dirty coal and unethical crude oil corporate Capitol Hill lobbyists, many now wonder if junk GOP science – especially Missouri Republican congressman and US senate hopeful Todd Akin’s misguided junk science is now poised to destroy not just America’s education system, but also its industry and commerce – and even the environment – as well? Looks like I’ll be waiting in vain for a truly American innovation in stem-cell based therapy.

If you are old enough to remember the mid-1990s, you’ll be old enough to remember the most influential members of the US Republican Party resorting to organized Christian scripture and dogma to deny that global warming and climate change is mainly caused by dirty coal and crude oil burning. Not to mention resorting to demagoguery and political influence – instead of science and reasoned argument – to stifle American women’s reproductive rights. And the latest of this line of GOP junk science is brought to us televised via Missouri Republican congressman and US senate hopeful Todd Akin over his “arcane” explanation of the junk science of his legitimate rape theory where women’s bodies have a biologically innate or natural tendency not to get pregnant when they are “legitimately raped”. Doesn’t this remind you of that Nazi era Ice Universe Theory that even Adolf Hitler found too fantastic to be believed?

Ultra-Compact Webcam, Anyone?

2012-03-03T02:47:00.003-08:00

Given that a specimen of Bose-Einstein Condensate can almost stop a beam of light. Can this enormous refractive index be used in constructing an ultra-compact webcam?

By: Ringo Bones

Ever since Danish-born physicist Dr. Lene Vestergaard Hau and her Harvard team of physicists managed to slow down a light beam from 300-million meters-per-second to 3-meters-per-second – akin to a little girl riding a bicycle – with a cigar-shaped specimen of Bose-Einstein Condensate back in 1999. One can only imagine the tremendous refractive index of Bose-Einstein Condensate if used in optical applications given its ability to slow down light by a factor of 100 million.

At present, most optical front-ends of CCD-type digital cameras that are de rigueur in mobile phone / cellular phone / webcam applications are made of low-cost – make that cheap – plastic lenses, never mind ophthalmology-grade glass that’s 35% lead to increase its refractive index or those expensive and esoteric gemstone-grade diamonds shaped into optical lenses. But what advantages does a “practical” optical-grade Bose-Einstein Condensate lens over the current state-of-the-art?

The higher the refractive index of the Bose-Einstein Condensate optics means the possibility of making your webcam or mobile phone or cellular phone camera more compact in comparison to ones currently available. This could mean microscopic surveillance cameras too small to be seen by unaided human eyes. Or how abut equipping your nano-sized robot-surgeons with a camera? The applications of such a breakthrough are seemingly endless. Bose-Einstein Condensate Digital Cameras could be the next best thing in the next CES show in Las Vegas in the not-too-distant future.

What about the problem of maintaining the near-absolute-zero temperature of the Bose-Einstein Condensate optical front-end? Given the current state of cost-effective Aerogel insulation technology, near-absolute-zero temperatures could be easily maintained by enclosing the Bose-Einstein Condensate optical lens in those housings used to contain semiconductor chips; thus shifting the problem of maintaining near-absolute-zero temperature of the Bose-Einstein Condensate only in the manufacturing and fabricating stage. Expensive at first, but electronic hobbyists could one day be soldering packaged Bose-Einstein Condensate lenses on their latest projects.

Stanford Prison Experiment:Bad Science?

2011-08-25T02:38:00.000-07:00

Forty years ago, a supposedly routine experiment had gone awry over the course of the study. Are we still ignoring the lessons learned from the Stanford Prison Experiment?

By: Ringo Bones

In August 2011, the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment "silently" celebrated its 40th Anniversary. And yet it seems that the lessons supposedly learned fro the experiment seems to be ignored these days, not just by the scientific community, but also by the society-at-large as well. The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal is a case-in-point.

Back around August 1971, the seemingly routine academic study to explore human behavior in a "penal setting" slowly started to go awry as the experiment went on. The subjects playing the role of the prisoners eventually adopted a submissive stance while the subjects playing the role of the prison guards eventually became more authoritarian and tyrannical. Shades of the Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal that eventually got the media's attention back in April 2004?

Even though 40 years had passed, the Stanford Prison Experiment had been oft cited as a prime example of "bad science" and has since established legal precedents on the controls when conducting such experiments in behavioral psychology. In this day and age, the Stanford Prison Experiment style study will never be allowed without the since established controls. And yet the Bush Administration seemingly has done something similar in prosecuting their "War on Terror" in the form of Extraordinary Renditions and Enhanced Interrogation.

Is Chemistry Still Relevant in the 21st Century?

2011-08-05T01:59:00.000-07:00

As the world celebrate the UN-sponsored 2011 International Year of Chemistry, is the science of chemistry still of vital importance in the 21st Century?

By: Ringo Bones

Back in 1999, science writers raved about labeling the 21st Century as the "Century of Biology" due to the advances in biological sciences and the much touted progress of the human genome mapping project just started a few years before and the implied discoveries it might usher in a few years down the road. The said science writers even dubbed the 19th Century as the "Century of Chemistry", probably due to the discoveries made in that century ushering in much of the 20th Century's vital chemical industry - while the 20th Century was dubbed as the "Century of Physics" not only because the "Century of Physics" actually started in 1896 with various scientists around Europe discovering hitherto unknown facts about the natural phenomena of radioactive decay, but also nuclear weapons and the nuclear power generation industry became the primary geopolitical force for much of the post World War II history of the 20th Century. But is it still fair to question the extent of importance of the science of chemistry in the 21st Century?

As a chemistry buff, an overwhelming landmark discoveries of the science of chemistry - in my opinion - did happen in the 19th Century and most of them in Victorian Era Europe. German chemist Friedrich Wöhler "repudiating" the barrier between organic and inorganic chemistry after he synthesized urea - an organic compound then believed to can only be produced by biological processes - from two inorganic compounds - i.e. by mixing silver cyanate and ammonium chloride. Expecting to find ammonium cyanate - an inorganic salt - as the precipitate, Wöhler instead found out that he had produced urea, an organic compound then believed to be "impossible" to synthesize by inorganic means. Just one of the events that had made the 19th Century to be dubbed as the "Century of Chemistry".

Sadly in the 20th Century and the 21st Century too, lone chemists making landmark discoveries are a rare event since most chemists these days are tenured specialists by big industrial chemical companies like Dow and DuPont. Even those clever chemical remediation schemes funded by the American Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund program to clean up groundwater contaminated by toxic chemical wastes are more often than not a team effort by tenured chemists.

God is not Necessary - Thus Spake Stephen Hawking

2010-11-22T00:38:00.000-08:00

As the latest findings in his search for the “Theory of Everything” got press attention yet again, did Prof. Stephen Hawking got it right in concluding that God is not necessary in the creation of the Universe?

By: Ringo Bones

Back in September 2010, there had been a huge uproar over Prof. Stephen Hawking’s latest book titled “The Grand Design” where the eminent theoretical physics professor openly spoke out that God or any other contrived deity isn’t necessary or has nothing whatsoever to do with our Universe coming into being and its day to day operations. The remark may seem somewhat opinionated from the standpoint of “soft agnostics”, but even if Professor Hawking is right, many did question if he has the right to speak out such a conclusion.

From a theoretical physicist’s point of view, Hawking’s The Grand Design is a strong proof-based implication that “God” or any other dogmatically contrived deity is not needed on the creation of the Universe – i.e. the Big Bang. In this day and age, the strong consensus of the collection of evidence-based knowledge of the scientific community could easily trump theological dogma. Unfortunately – even in some affluent nations – religious dogma still reigns supreme and even reserves the right to deny the rights of ethnic minorities and women.

In a stark comparison to scientific consensus, even organized Christianity’s various denominations and sects can’t even agree on or even established an evidence-based consensus about the ontological empiricism defining “God”. Yet, the Archbishop of Canterbury who has the good fortune of establishing himself as the first and “loudest” critic of Professor Hawking’s latest opus – says that “physics” can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God. Even Brian May – guitarist of premier British rock band Queen – who also has several science degrees also voiced his criticism on Professor Hawking deciding to pit science with religion / spirituality.

Unfortunately, despite being now entrenched in NY Times’ Bestseller List, Hawking’s The Grand Design – like his previous works – will more likely than not be soon forgotten because an overwhelming majority who bought it only bought it as a conversation piece and for its novelty value, as opposed to their genuine fascination of the subject of cutting-edge theoretical physics. The science versus religion rift will probably never heal because religion still has the bigger war-chest that enables it to achieve its ends no matter how devious the means are.