Particle Decelerator

Fundaments of physics safe - thanks to dodgy cable

2012-02-24T01:01:00.002+01:00

The physics world was alive this week with news that last year's celebrated superluminal neutrino results from the OPERA experiment may have been down to the most domestic of causes - dodgy wiring.

Last September the OPERA research group at the Gran Sasso underground lab in central Italy shocked the physics world by reporting they had recorded neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light. Neutrinos released from the LHC particle accelerator near Geneva appeared to have travelled the 730km to the Italian lab at speeds exceeding the speed of light. It was a finding that would have turned all of modern physics on it's proverbial head, as it contradicts Einstein's special theory of relativity. The physics community responded with overwhelming skepticism, but as yet had not been able to find the error in their research.
Until this week.

CERN have now released a statement to confirm that a flaw in the OPERA experiment that could explain its puzzling neutrino discovery. It could be down to a faulty optical fibre. The collaboration is now investigating this, and another possible source of error, and it plans to carry out new experimental runs in May.

The statement reads:

"The OPERA collaboration has informed its funding agencies and host laboratories that it has identified two possible effects that could have an influence on its neutrino timing measurement. These both require further tests with a short pulsed beam. If confirmed, one would increase the size of the measured effect, the other would diminish it. The first possible effect concerns an oscillator used to provide the time stamps for GPS synchronizations. It could have led to an overestimate of the neutrino's time of flight. The second concerns the optical fibre connector that brings the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock, which may not have been functioning correctly when the measurements were taken. If this is the case, it could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos. The potential extent of these two effects is being studied by the OPERA collaboration. New measurements with short pulsed beams are scheduled for May."

Source: http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2011/PR19.11E.html

Holy yoctometers! A new scale-model of the universe

2012-02-21T23:29:00.003+01:00

This simply extraordinary online project created by a ninth-grade pupil called Cary Huang is a scale model of the universe from it's smallest particle scales to it's largest cosmic scales.

As Physics Buzz reports:

"The model serves as both a virtual microscope and telescope, allowing viewers to see the relative sizes of the smallest quarks, the largest galaxy clusters, and everything in between. There are hundreds of objects to scroll through, and each one has its own quirky description."

The level of detail in the project is breathtaking. It's a remarkably instructive visualisation and a very beautiful tool. That it was made by a school student is quite astonishing.

Source: http://htwins.net/scale2/

Time Crystals

2012-02-17T12:50:00.002+01:00

Are crystals possible in time, as well as in space?

Undoubtedly the most outlandish, and beautiful story in this week's science press was the pre-publication of two new papers by MIT's Nobel Prize–winning physicist, Frank Wilczek, which suggests that they are.

Wilczek postulates that if crystals exist in spatial dimensions, then they should exist in the dimension of time too. A time crystal is the temporal equivalent of an everyday crystal, in which atoms occupy positions that repeat periodically in space.

The new research stems from Wilczek's analysis of one of the most important tenets of modern physics - "symmetry breaking". Wilczek, and theoretical particle physicist, Al Shapere, conclude that time symmetry seems just as breakable as spatial symmetry at low energies. Their pithy abstract, published on arXiv earlier this week says:

"We consider the possibility that classical dynamical systems display motion in their lowest energy state, forming a time analogue of crystalline spatial order."

A further abstract postulating the existence of "quantum time crystals" states: "Difficulties around the idea of spontaneous breaking of time translation symmetry in a closed quantum mechanical system are identified, and then overcome in a simple model. The possibility of ordering in imaginary time is also discussed."

Science writers have been quick to interpret the significance of this work, with one helpful article by Alexandra Witze in Science News explaining how Wilczek dreamed up time crystals after teaching a class about classifying crystals in three dimensions. He wondered why that structure couldn’t extend to the fourth dimension - time.

She writes:
"To visualize a time crystal, think of Earth looping back to its same location in space every 365¼ days; the planet repeats itself periodically as it moves through time. But a true time crystal is made not of a planet but of an object in its lowest energy state, like an electron stripped of all possible energy. This object could endlessly loop in time, just as electrons in a superconductor could theoretically flow through space for all eternity."

Wilczek has described how the concept of time crystals reminds him of the excitement he felt when he helped describe a new class of fundamental particles, called anyons, in the 1982.

“I had very much the same kind of feeling as I’m having here,” he says, “that I had a found a new logical possibility for how matter might behave that opened up a new world with many possible directions.”

He went on to note: “I don’t know if this will be of lasting value at all,”

I couldn't help being reminded of Heinrich Hertz's quote when he produced radio waves in the laboratory for the first time: "It's of no use whatsoever...this is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right" - Hertz (1887)

It remains to be seen if Wilczek and Shapere's outlandish theory proves to have the profound impact on physics that Hertz's work has had. It will be interesting to see what research follows this publication, and whether or not this idea can be experimentally tested. As physicist Ben Still noted in his talk on Wednesday 15 February, ""Until theorists can come up with ways we can test their theories, they are just dealing with works of fiction."

But when ideas like this emerge, one can't help celebrating the existence of theorists.

Source: http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.2537 & http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.2539

& http://www.sciencenews.org

Chasing Ghosts - those elusive neutrinos

2012-02-16T00:11:00.003+01:00

Particle Decelerator attended a fascinating talk on 15 February by Ben Still, a particle physicist working on the Tokai to Kamioka (T2K) neutrino experiment in Japan, alongside another 500 scientists and engineers.

Held in Lewes in Sussex, Still's talk, entitled "Chasing Ghosts and the Creation of the Universe" attempted to shine a light on the current state of play in neutrino research.

As the abstract noted:
Neutrinos are all around us in every nook and cranny. Trillions upon trillions inside and out of every planet, star, galaxy and the space in between. Billions pass through you every single second, night and day. But despite the phenomenal numbers it was not until 1953 that conclusive evidence of the existence of the neutrino, the most abundant thing in nature, was discovered. Since then scientists have devoted their lives to chasing these ghosts of nature. Despite its meagre size the tiny neutrino has had a profound effect upon our Universe and may hold the answer to one of the greatest questions of all time: the creation of the universe.

Still began by giving an introductory background to the history of this field of science, noting the key contributions by Wolfgang Pauli, Enrico Fermi, Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines.He then analysed the famous faster-than-light neutrino results, which the OPERA experiment yielded in 2011. He concluded by providing insight into why this field of study is beginning to yield results that may help us answer fundamental questions such as where all the matter in the universe came from. Preliminary results from T2K in 2011 are discussed in further detail here.

"We are going to work as hard as we can to confirm or refute it"
Ben Still on T2K's commitment to cross-check OPERA's neutrino result.

During his talk, Still confirmed that checking the OPERA results is a key priority for both T2K in Japan, and their sister experiment MINOS in the States. T2K was taken offline due to the logistical impact of the earthquake in Japan in 2011, and the subsequent Fukushima disaster, and is only just now coming back online. Upgrades of both MIINOS and T2K are underway, and it is expected that MINOS will start yielding research that may refute or confirm the OPERA result within a year, with things taking a bit longer at T2K - perhaps up to 2 - 3 years.

In many ways, the Q&A was the most fascinating part of the evening, with Still clearly identifying himself as an experimentalist first. He spoke articulately and passionately about the importance of evidence based science, declaring,"we should be lead by experiment, not theory."
"Until theorists can come up with ways we can test their theories, they are just dealing with works of fiction."

Whilst clearly respectful of the elegance of mathematics and theory, Still advocated an experiment-lead approach to science, stating that experiments such as the LHC were correcting a "bias toward theory that has defined physics since the 1970s".

He quipped, "mathematicians and theorists are going to love super-luminal neutrinos, because they enable them write grant applications that will allow them to indulge in the realm of fiction".

Deliberately provocative stuff, and a fantastically stimulating insight into the current lay of the land in neutrino research.

Intuition and Ingenuity - Art and Alan Turing

2012-02-14T19:16:00.003+01:00

At Lighthouse in Brighton science and art collide in a show which explores the enduring influence of of computer science pioneer, Alan Turing.

Curated by British-based artists, Sue Gollifer, Nick Lambert and Anna Dumitriu, Intuition and Ingenuity is a group exhibition, staged as part of Brighton Science Festival, that illustates the impact of Alan Turing on contemporary art. The exhibition includes computer art pioneers Roman Verostko, William Latham, Ernest Edmonds, and Paul Brown, as well as contemporary media artists, boredomresearch (their work is pictured), Greg Garvey, Patrick Tresset, Anna Dumitriu and Alex May.

The exhibition marks the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing, and it’s part of a year of programmes which celebrate Turing's centenary.

Whilst he may be best known the person who cracked the German Enigma codes during World War II, thus significantly altering the course of the war, Turing also undoubtedly paved the way for the digital world that we live in today. He gave us algorithms and computation, created the foundations of computer science and artificial intelligence, and pioneered new thinking in the field of morphogenesis. So influential is his work, that it's almost impossible to imagine the modern world, now so thoroughly replete with computational technology, without him.It's great to see his legacy honoured by artists and curators.

Intuition and Ingenuity is showing at Lighthouse in Brighton 17 - 26 February, and will then tour to venues in London, Sheffield, Birngham and beyond.

Invisible Fields: an interview with José Luis de Vicent

2012-01-26T15:40:00.001+01:00

Italian magazine, Domus, have published an interview with José Luis de Vicente, the co-curator of the art-science show, Invisible Fields.

Ethel Baraona Pohl introduces the interview by writing: "We inhabit intangible territories. The networks of invisible infrastructures which surround our world are extensive and growing day by day. In this context, Invisible Fields explores how the understanding of our world and our cosmos has been transformed by the study of radio waves."

In the interview, José Luis notes:
"I have an ongoing interest in my work in the infrastructures of information society, the historical, political and technological factors that have shaped them, and their impact on us as citizens. I feel it's hard to talk about technology as a agent of transformation without paying more attention to what goes in the infrastructural layer. This is quite common in architecture and urbanism, for obvious reasons, not so much in design or contemporary art. And one of the grand narratives about this theme is the progressive process of conquest and colonization of the radio spectrum throughout the 20th century, culminating in a way in the Digital Switchover in the first years of the 21st century. I've thought for a long time this is a story that has not been told cohesively, and evaluated from different disciplinary perspective. Invisible Fields is not that (that would be a titanic project, the work of a lifetime) but intends to be another piece in the construction of this greater story."

Read the full interview and review here: http://domusweb.it/en/interview/invisible-fields/

Invisible Fields is showing at Arts Santa Mònica in Barcelona, from 14 October 2011 - 4 March 2012.

Spider-goats and the Rise of Synthetic Biology

2012-01-18T13:59:00.002+01:00

Spider-goats, synthetic neurobiology and bio-hacking - Adam Rutherford's recent synthetic biology documentary for the BBC's flagship science programme, Horizon, is an important compendium of cutting edge ideas. Equal parts fascinating and disturbing, the documentary, provocatively entitled Playing God, was an overview of how synthetic biologists are breaking down nature into spare parts, and rebuilding it however they please.

Rutherford began by introducing viewers to "spider-goats" - goats which have been cross-bred with spiders, so that they excrete spider-silk in their milk.

Spider-silk is among the strongest materials which occurs in nature, but it's practical use to science has been limited by the relatively tiny amounts that scientists can extract from spiders. Spiders are notoriously impossible to farm, due to their cannibalistic nature. So scientists at Utah State University have come up with an ingenious method of producing spider-silk in industrial quantities.

As Rutherford explains in an article for The Observer, Randy Lewis, a professor of genetics at Utah, took the gene that encodes silk from an orb-weaver spider, and placed it among the DNA that prompts milk production in the goats. This genetic circuit was then inserted in an egg and implanted into a mother goat. Now, when the goats lactate, their milk contains spider-silk protein. The practical use for large quantities of spider-silk are numerous, but Lewis is interested in it's medical potential. He notes, "we already know that we can produce spider silk that's good enough to be used in ligament repair. [....] We've done some studies that show that you can put it in the body and you don't get inflammation and get ill."

The documentary further probed the medical implications for this type of work by introducing Ron Weiss's work at MIT. Weiss's team are creating living programmable machines that seek and destroy only the cells that cause disease. Using BioBricks, they have built a "cancer assassin cell". It distinguishes a cancer cell from a healthy cell using a set of five criteria. It then destroys the tumour cell if it satisfied those conditions. As Rutherford notes, "this sniper targeting is the opposite of the blunderbuss approach of chemotherapy, which can destroy both tumour and healthy cells with reckless abandon."

The documentary also probed how relatively simple it has become to experiment with synthetic biology, due to the popularisation of BioBricks and the emergence of biohacking and biology-hobbyists such as BioCurious. After visiting the BioCurious hobby space in the States, Rutherford comments: "there, high-school students were learning about biology by introducing fluorescent proteins from deep-sea jellyfish into bacteria to make them glow in the dark. In 2009, three scientists won Nobel prizes for this work. Already, it is literally child's play."

The documentary analyses industrial applications of synthetic biology, such as the development of synthetic biodiesel. Biotech companies Amyris have modified brewer's yeast so that instead of fermenting sugar to produce alcohol, diesel seeps out of every cell. The biodiesel is already in use.

Rutherford takes a balanced approach to the field, giving watchdog and campaign group, ETC, an opportunity to point of the risks of producing synethetic organisms on an industrial scale.. Their stance on synthetic biology can be found here.

This fascinating documentary and the companion article in The Observer, which documents the main narrative, is an excellent primer to an incredibly fast-moving field.

Sources:
BBC Horizon
The Observer

Guardian Podcast

Remnants of Cosmic Noise in New Zealand

2012-01-06T19:31:00.001+01:00

Yesterday a friend of mine, Mike Hodgson, drew my attention to a plaque he discovered in Piha, near Auckland, in my native New Zealand. The plaque - pictured above - is commemorating a major event in radio astronomy history. In August 1948, two radio astronomers, John Bolton and kiwi, Gordon Stanley detected radio waves from outside the solar system for the first time.

This blog post from piha.co.nz documents the scientific discovery in detail.

"It is difficult to comprehend the emotional impact of an observation which took us from the partially explicable solar system and galactic radio emission phenomena, into the realms of phenomena with inexplicably high energy outputs," Stanley wrote in 1994, in a tribute to Bolton, who died in 1993. "Neither of us ever approached such an emotional high again in our work."

Further research showed that the radio signals emanated from the Crab Nebula, the remains of a star that went supernova over a thousand years ago, and a source of fascination for radio and optical astronomers alike. Some of the other radio sources they detected in the same year, during observations in Australia, turned out to be distant galaxies. Radio waves were generated by gas falling into giant black holes.

Following their pioneering discoveries, Bolton went on to become a major figure in Australian radio astronomy, helping found the famous Parkes radio telescope, becoming director of the Australian National Radio Astronomy Observatory and winning the the inaugural Jansky Prize in 1966 (so named after the father of radio astronomy, Karl Jansky).
Stanley became the first Director of the Owens Valley Radio Observatory in the States, run by Caltech.

As a New Zealander with a passionate interest in radio astronomy, I was mightily pleased to discover that 64 years ago, New Zealand was at the very epicentre of radio astronomical research. I'm not sure the same could be said now, but perhaps the radio astronomers of the future can take inspirational from the past.

Source: http://www.piha.co.nz/?p=324

Listening to the earth move

2011-12-23T19:46:00.001+01:00

Christchurch-based sound engineer Ben Edwards recorded a magnitude 6 earthquake which struck earthquake-plagued Christchurch in New Zealand on 23.12.11.

As Edwards tells it, "whilst recording some drums in an old brick warehouse for the up and coming Eastern album we experienced a large aftershock. (5.8 in magnitude). We sat outside for a while and convinced ourselves it was ok to re enter the old building and continue our project... I was rolling as we were undertaking some line and level checking... this time we got it. 6.0 magnitude in a room full of kegs and bottles."

It's an incredible and sobering listen, and helps you understand what it must be like living in Christchurch - a city that's experienced nearly 10,000 earthqukes since the big one in September 2010.

Source: http://soundcloud.com/charlie-underwood/chch-earthquake-23-12-11-raw

The LHC finds its first new particle

2011-12-22T20:04:00.004+01:00

After the excitement from last week's press conference from CERN, which revealed that whilst they are getting closer, scientists still haven't found the Higg's boson, I don't think anyone was expecting a boson discovery from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) after-all. But we've been given an early Christmas present: the LHC has found it's first particle - Chi_b(nP).

Chi_b(nP) was found by physicists working with the ATLAS detector, who published their findings on arXiv yesterday. It is the first clear evidence for a new particle since the LHC opened in 2009.

Chi_b(nP) is made of a beauty quark and it's antiquark bound together. They are bonded by the so-called strong nuclear force which also causes the atomic nucleus to stick together. Chi_b(nP) is a heavier version of a particle that was first observed around 25 years ago. Like the elusive Higgs, it is a boson, meaning it is a particle that carries force.

"It's interesting for what it tells us about the forces that hold the quark and the anti-quark together - the strong nuclear force. And that's the same force that holds, for instance, the atomic nucleus together with its protons and the neutrons."

Prof Roger Jones from the ATLAS Collaboration, quoted on BBC News.

Source: http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.5154

The 3D printer as teleporter

2011-12-22T16:52:00.001+01:00

If you only read one article on 3D printing this year, it should be Anil Dash's fascinating analysis of this important emerging technology. Set out as a set of observations and pearls of wisdom aimed at people experimenting with the technology, the article acts as a sort of wishlist for where Dash hopes the 3D fabrication and printing world is headed. Contained within the list is this nugget:

"These devices are not '3D fax machines'. What you've actually made, when you have an internet-connected device that can both send and receive 3D-printed objects, is a teleporter."
Provocative and exciting stuff. Read the article now.

Source: http://dashes.com/anil/2011/12/3d-printing-teleporters-and-wishes.html

Science has nothing to fear from uncertainty

2011-12-13T10:23:00.002+01:00

Ahead of today's press conference from CERN, which provides an update of the search for the Higg's boson, LHC physicist, Jon Butterworth, published a thoughtful piece in the Guardian, which reflected on this and the recent neutrino results from OPERA. In relation to the Higgs, he noted;

"Thanks to this machine, we will know quite soon which option – Higgs boson, or not – is realised in nature. If you are curious about the universe we live in, the prospect is pretty tasty either way. The Higgs boson is a long-searched-for prediction of the "standard model" of particle physics. Should it exist, it is responsible for the mass of the fundamental particles we are all made of, such as electrons and quarks. Its discovery would be a stunning vindication that our aesthetics and mathematics are genuinely connected with how the universe really operates. If it doesn't exist, then in a sense it's back to the drawing board: it would mean our understanding of nature has failed at the energies accessible at the LHC. We would have to learn some new tricks."

The quote that really caught my eye though was Butterworth's elaboration of the title of this post:

"It is worth being wrong in public sometimes. We should all know that science is a betting system, not a belief system. Near-certainty arises from a morass of uncertainty, it does not drop from heaven gift-wrapped. "

And now back to holding our breath ahead of the CERN press seminar ....

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/12/higgs-boson-particle-physics-benefit

Has the LHC found the Higgs?

2011-12-07T16:23:00.000+01:00

The science blogosphere has been alive with rumours for the past few days suggesting that the large Hadron Collider may have found strong evidence for the Higgs boson. Staff have been notified that a press conference is being held on 13 December, with updates being given from the research groups associated with the two main detectors at the LHC - ATLAS and the CMS.

The rumours are centred on evidence of the Higgs being located at low mass ranges - around 125-126 GeV.

The rumours have become so strong that John Ellis, Clerk Maxwell Professor of Theoretical Physics at King's College London, was quoted today on the BBC, saying that he's expecting to see "the first glimpse of the Higgs next week:

"I think we are going to get the first glimpse. The LHC experiments have already looked high and low for this missing piece. It could be that it weighs several hundred times the proton mass, but that seems very unlikely, then there's a whole intermediate range where we know it cannot be, then there's the low mass range where we actually expect it might be. There seem to be some hints emerging there... and that's what we're going to learn on Tuesday".

Ian Sample provided a useful update of the various positions and murmurings here.

Source: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4212

Is the wavefunction physically real?

2011-11-18T14:29:00.004+01:00

Fundamental physics is having a big week! This week Eugenie Reich at Nature reported on a paper that's sending shockwaves through the quantum physics world. Physicists including by Matthew Pusey at Imperial College London, are daring to imagine that the staple of quantum theory - the wavefunction - might be a little bit more real that physicists had previous believed.

As Reich outlines:
"At the heart of the weirdness for which the field of quantum mechanics is famous is the wavefunction, a powerful but mysterious entity that is used to determine the probabilities that quantum particles will have certain properties. [....] Whereas many physicists have generally interpreted the wavefunction as a statistical tool that reflects our ignorance of the particles being measured, [Pusey & co] argue that, instead, it is physically real."

“I don't like to sound hyperbolic, but I think the word 'seismic' is likely to apply to this paper,” says Antony Valentini, a theoretical physicist specializing in quantum foundations at Clemson University in South Carolina.

Source: http://www.nature.com & http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/1111.3328

20Hz by Semiconductor

2011-11-10T18:47:00.001+01:00

One of the works commissioned for the Invisible Fields: Geographies of Radio Waves exhibition in Barcelona was 20 Hz, an amazing new piece by Brighton-based artists and filmmakers, Semiconductor.

Semiconductor were commissioned to make a piece which showed us the relationship between radio waves and sound. The resulting work - 20 Hz - is an astonishing 5 minute video which uses data collected by the CARISMA radio array. CARISMA (Canadian Array for Realtime Investigations of Magnetic Activity) is is an array of magnetometers which study the Earth’s magnetosphere. 20 Hz is an interpretation of a magnetic storm occurring in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The CARISMA data – captured at the frequency of 20 Hertz – is interpreted as audio, allowing us to hear the “tweets” and “rumbles” caused by the interaction of solar wind with the Earth’s magnetosphere. The visual element of the film is generated directly by the sound. Tangible and sculptural forms emerge suggestive of scientific visualisations. As different frequencies interact both visually and aurally, complex patterns emerge to create interference phenomena that probe the limits of our perception.

You can watch it at the artists’ website here.

Invisible Fields: Geographies of Radio Waves is a show that explores how our understanding of our world and our cosmos has been transformed by the study of radio waves. It is showing at Arts Santa Mònica in Barcelona, from 14 October 2011 - 4 March 2012.

Source:

http://www.semiconductorfilms.com/root/20Hz/20Hz.htm

http://www.lighthouse.org.uk/programme/semiconductor-20-hz

Invisible Fields: Geographies of Radio Waves

2011-10-25T18:23:00.000+02:00

Wireless in the World by Timo Arnall, showing at Invisible Fields.

Last week a new exhibition exploring the radio spectrum - the invisible environment that underpins contemporary technology - opened at Arts Santa Mònica in Barcelona. Mixing science, politics, architecture, design and art, Invisible Fields sets out the spectrum as a physical space, invisible but present, a terrain that can be studied, mapped, surveyed and explored.

It is co-curated by Spanish researcher and curator, José Luis de Vicente and Particle Decelerator's Honor Harger, and is a co-production of Arts Santa Mònica and Lighthouse in the UK (where Honor works).

The exhibition illustrates how artists, designers and activists have worked in tandem with scientists and researchers to illuminate some of most important characteristics of this intangible ecology. It includes well-known artists such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Trevor Paglen, Semiconductor, and Joyce Hinterding, as well as designers including Timo Arnall (of super-design form, BERG) and Anthony DeVincenzi (of the MIT Media Lab), and interventions from astrophysicists, engineers and hackers.

Invisible Fields shows how radio space is an environment made of signals and waves from nature, and from us. Its topography is formed of waves of different scales, from tiny emissions given off by domestic objects to vast emissions made by distant astronomical phenomena. It's made up of signals that are very familiar, such as television and radio, to the esoteric and enigmatic signals. It is an ecology that has public spaces - wireless internet and amateur radio - and secret spaces - coded military transmissions and clandestine signals.

This kind of interdisciplinary exploration of a topic such as the radio spectrum, is rarely undertaken by cultural institutions. With the exception of visionary galleries such as The Science Gallery in Dublin, few arts organisations are open to the idea of exhibitions which blend artistic practice, social-cultural analysis, and science communication. This makes the Laboratory space of Arts Santa Mònica, directed by Josep Perelló, very special, and well worth keeping an eye on.

A catalogue is being produced featuring guest essays by guest essays by Douglas Kahn, Adam Greenfield, Martin Howse. The catalogue, pub;lished by ACTAR, is released in three editions - English, Spanish and Catalan.
There's an online preview of the catalogue here.

Invisible Fields is showing at Arts Santa Mònica in Barcelona, from 14 October 2011 - 4 March 2012.

Source: http://www.lighthouse.org.uk/programme/invisible-fields

Largest Radio Telescope Ever Launched into Space is Set to Go

2011-07-17T21:09:00.003+02:00

Exciting news in the world of radio astronomy this week, as several sources confirm that the long awaited Russian space telescope, RadioAstron, is due to launch on 18 July from Kazakhstan's Baikonur cosmodrome.

RadioAstron (pictured at Baikonur) will orbit the earth, and using interferometry, will become the the largest radio telescope ever built, with an observing area almost 30 times the Earth's diameter.

"There has never been a radio telescope that has been sent so far from the Earth," commented Yuri Kovalev, of Lebedev Physical Institute's Astro Space Center in Moscow, Russia, the managers of the project.

When it reaches an orbit that will extend almost as far as the moon, it will begin coordinating observations with telescopes on the ground, including the 100 metre radio telescopes in Green Bank, West Virginia, and Effelsberg, Germany, and the world's largest dish, the 305 metre Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico.

The technique of interferometry is commonly used in radio astronomy. It involves linking telescopes from across the world in simultaneous observations of a single astronomical target. It is the basis for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which is being hailed - alongside the LHC - as one of the great science endeavours of the early 21st Century. Particle Decelerator reported on the SKA in April.

RadioAstron's principle science objective is to study the super massive black hole at the centre of Messier 87, a nearby galaxy. It will also be observing pulsars - spinning neutron stars - attempting to help astronomers understand how dust and gas is distributed around stars. But perhaps the most fascinating phenomena that RadioAstron will examine is natural masers. In electronics, a maser - "microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation" - is a device that amplifies electromagnetic waves. But masers occur in nature as well. Natural masers are found in outer space when water or other substances are excited by radiation from a star or by the energy of a collision.

As Rachel Courtland explains in New Scientist, RadioAstron "will also be able to register the radio waves emitted by water masers, clouds of water molecules that emit microwave radiation, in the discs of galaxies. This motion can be used to study the rotation rate of the galaxies and measure their distance from Earth. When combined with observations of how fast the galaxies are moving, astronomers can use the galaxy distances to calculate the present-day expansion rate of space and the effect of dark energy."

Conceived in Soviet times, RadioAstron has been delayed multiple times over the past two decades, so it's launch is being met with excitement and relief within the international radio astronomy community. The rocket carrying RadioAstron is due for launch from Baikonur at 0231 GMT on 18 July 2011.

Source: http://www.asc.rssi.ru/radioastron/

http://www.federalspace.ru/main.php?id=2&nid=17486

http://wvgazette.com/News/201107120808

Dark Energy Lurking in the Cosmic Background?

2011-07-17T12:45:00.003+02:00

Two new papers published in the Physical Review Letters appear to provide new evidence for the existence of dark energy – the mysterious substance that appears to be accelerating the expansion of the universe. A team of astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley have found what they refer to as "direct evidence" for dark energy within the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

Science writer, Colin Stuart explains:

"The CMB is the faint afterglow of the universe's birth in the Big Bang. Around 400,000 years after its creation, the universe had cooled sufficiently to allow electrons to bind to atomic nuclei. This "recombination" set the CMB radiation free from the dense fog of plasma that was containing it. Space telescopes such as WMAP and Planck have charted the CMB and found its presence in all parts of the sky, with a temperature of 2.7K. However, measurements also show tiny fluctuations in this temperature on the scale of one part in a million. These fluctuations follow a Gaussian distribution."

Sudeep Das and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, used the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile to uncover fluctuations in the CMB that deviate from this Gaussian distribution. "On average, a CMB photon will have encountered around 50 large-scale structures before it reaches our telescope," Das told Physics World.

"The gravitational influence of these structures, which are dominated by massive clumps of dark matter, will each deflect the path of the photon," he adds. This process, called "lensing", eventually adds up to a total deflection of around 3 arc minutes – one-20th of a degree.

Stuart elaborates further:

"In the second paper Das, along with Blake Sherwin of Princeton University and Joanna Dunkley of Oxford University, looks at how lensing could reveal dark energy. Dark energy acts to counter the emergence of structures within the universe. A universe with no dark energy would have a lot of structure. As a result, the CMB photons would undergo greater lensing and the fluctuations would deviate more from the original Gaussian distribution. However, the opposite was found to be true. "We see too little lensing to account for a universe with no dark energy," Sherwin told physicsworld.com. "In fact, the amount of lensing we see is consistent with the amount of dark energy we would expect to see from other measurements."

This is the first time dark energy has been inferred from measurements of the CMB alone.

The fact that this is direct evidence, rather than relying on a second measurement, excites Stephen Boughn, a cosmologist at Haverford College in the US. "We currently only have two pieces of direct evidence for dark energy. Any additional evidence that indicates its existence is very important," he says. "We want a patchwork of evidence, from many different places, just to make sure the whole picture hangs together. This work helps with that."

Source: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/46572

Particle physics wind chime

2011-06-25T14:08:00.002+02:00

Continuing our theme of sonification, particle physicist Matt Bellis is one of a group of scientists who have created a novel way of transforming particle detectors into musical instruments. The Particle Physics Windchime is a computer application that takes particle physics data, such as particle type, momentum, distance from a fixed point, and other datasets, and turns it into sound. First conceived at the Science Hack Day in San Francisco in 2010 by Bellis and fellow scientist, David Harris, the Windchime is currently sonifying data from BABAR, a high energy physics experiment located at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California.

In creating their instrument, Bellis and his collaborators were inspired by the way that wind chimes work. Their chime is played by the particles passing through it, just like wind through a wind chime. "Think of it," Bellis said in a recent interview with SLAC, "the wind itself makes no sound. You hear the wind if it rustles the leaves in a tree. The motion of the wind itself doesn't necessarily make a sound. The wind has to interact with something to make noise." In the same way, "When you have these particles that pass through the detector, they send it ringing, resonating."

Bellis emphasises that sonifying data in this way can help lead to important new scientific insights: "I wanted to create the Particle Physics Windchime partly because I wanted to see if there's something new we can learn from the data. Is there something I can hear in the data that I can't see or that a computer can't pick up? Will it add to an intuitive understanding of the data?"

The Particle Physics Windchime is by no means the only project that sonifies particle physics data in order to understand it in new ways. The LHC Sound Project has been converting data from the ATLAS experiment at CERN for the last two years.

Run by Lily Asquith, Richard Dobson, Archer Endrich and Alabama 3 percussionist, Sir Eddie Real, the project is helping scientists see data from the LHC in different ways. The scientists and composers have notes in several interviews how musical the data appears to be:

"We can hear clear structures in the sound, almost as if they had been composed. They seem to tell a little story all to themselves. They're so dynamic and shifting all the time, it does sound like a lot of the music that you hear in contemporary composition," Richard Dobson (in an interview with the BBC, June 2010).

Sources: https://news.slac.stanford.edu/features/ear-science-particle-physics-windchime-0

http://www.stanford.edu

A history of the universe in sound

2011-06-25T13:26:00.003+02:00

Our Particle Decelerator correspondent gives a TED talk on the story of the history of the universe by listening. It's punctuated by three anecdotes which show how accidental encounters with strange noises, taught us some of the most important things we know about space ...

Whilst the talk refers to "sounds from space", it is important to emphasise that stars and planets are not directly audible. Sound waves can not propagate in the vacuum of space. However, it is possible for radio waves emitted from celestial bodies to be heard by using radio technology.

The talk recalls the early history of the science of radio astronomy. Before astronomy was computerised, radio astronomers would monitor radio telescopes by listening. In our solar system, the Sun is the strongest source of radio waves, so it's the most powerful transmitter in our radio sky. Jupiter also sends us strong, and beautifully varied, radio signals. And radio astronomers also detect radio waves from far-flung celestial bodies in the distant universe, and simple audification techniques allow us to hear these signals.

Source: http://www.ted.com/talks/honor_harger_a_history_of_the_universe_in_sound.html

Uncertainty isn't what it used to be

2011-06-04T12:05:00.002+02:00

One of the central planks of quantum mechanics was this week called into question in a new take on the classic two-slit experiment.

One of the central notions in quantum mechanics is that light and matter can behave as both particle and wave. The principle of "complementarity" has always been understood to prevent the observation of both behaviours simultaneously. However, new research published in Science on 2 June, suggests that physicists at the University of Toronto and Griffith University in Brisbane have for the first time observed both behaviours at the same time.

In Thomas Young's 19th century "two-slit experiment", light is passed through two tiny holes and is then viewed on a screen. The two beams interfere with each other, forming a diffraction pattern, as if the light were made of waves. If one of the slits is blocked, the light can be seen as a single beam on the screen, as if light were made of particles. The two-slit experiment shows that, depending on how it's measured, a photon will act like either a particle or a wave, but never both.

Aephraim Steinberg of the University of Toronto and Sacha Kocsis of Griffith recreated this experiment, easily observing the interference pattern indicative of the wave nature of light. But significantly, they were also able measure the path of the particles of light.

Science reporter, Adrian Cho elaborates on the importance of their new research:
"For decades, [the] experiment has served as physicists' canonical example of the uncertainty principle: the law of nature that says you can't know both where a subatomic particle is and how fast it is moving, and thus can't trace its trajectory. But now physicists have tweaked that classic experiment to show that they can follow the average path taken by many particles."

Steinberg and his team allowed photons to pass through a calcite crystal which gave each photon a small deviation in its path. By measuring the light patterns on a camera, the team was able to deduce what paths the photons had taken. They clearly saw the interference pattern which infers the wave nature of light, but surprisingly they also could see from which slits the photons had come from, a telltale sign of the particle nature of light.

Marlan Scully, a quantum physicist at Texas University, commented:

"It's a beautiful series of measurements by an excellent group, the likes of which I've not seen before.",

"This paper is probably the first that has really put this weak measurement idea into a real experimental realisation." He said that the work would - inevitably - raise philosophical issues as well. "The exact way to think about what they're doing will be researched for some time, and the weak measurement concept itself will be a matter of controversy"

Professor Steinberg commented, "I feel like we're starting to pull back a veil on what nature really is".

Source: http://news.sciencemag.org

&
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6034/1170.abstract

Sail to The Moon

2011-05-15T13:08:00.002+02:00

In one of the more poetic and outlandish stories this week, The Observer report that engineers are planning to build the first extraterrestrial boat.

They want to launch the craft towards Titan - Saturn's largest moon - and parachute it on to the Ligeia Mare, a sea of methane and ethane on its surface.

Robin McKie, Science Editor of The Observer writes, "the robot ship would sail around this extraterrestrial sea for several months, exploring its coastline and measuring the winds and waves that sweep its surface."

Professor John Zarnecki, of the Open University is one of the scientists working on the project. "Waves on Titan's seas will be far larger, but much slower, than on earthly oceans, according to our calculations. That suggests Titan is the best spot in the solar system for surfing."

The mission to Titan - the only moon in the solar system with a thick atmosphere, of nitrogen and methane - would be the first exploration of a sea beyond Earth and could provide evidence about the possible existence of complex organic chemicals, the precursors of life.

It is part of the proposed Titan Mare Explorer, or TiME project.

If TiME is selected from a shortlist of three possible missions being considered for funding by NASA, McKie explains that "the TiME probe will be fired at Titan on a billion-mile journey across the solar system. Once it enters the moon's thick atmosphere the craft would parachute down towards the surface and then drop into the 300-mile-wide Ligeia Mare. It would then spend several months afloat on an oily sea taking measurements of waves, chemicals and other variables."

It follows on from the research undertaken by Cassini-Huygens. In 2005, the space-probe, Cassini deployed Huygens on the surface of Titan. Many of the instruments for that craft were built by Zarnecki and his Open University team, and that experience will put them in good stead for the TiME mission, should it go ahead.

Full story: http://www.guardian.co.uk

Source: Titan.pdf

&: SailtoThe Moon

Can bacteria transmit radio waves?

2011-04-25T16:05:00.003+02:00

This week arXiv published a controversial abstract positing possible evidence for electromagnetic emissions from bacterial organisms.

Whilst seemingly outlandish, this isn't a new area research. Bacterial radio waves were theorised in 2009 by French virologist Luc Montagnier, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2008 for the discovery of HIV.

Montagnier's highly controversial theory suggests that solutions containing the DNA of pathogenic bacteria and viruses, including HIV, could emit low frequency radio waves that induced surrounding water molecules to become arranged into nanostructures. These water molecules, he posited, could also emit radio waves. His research is summarised in this presentation paper.

But as Physics arXiv Blog at Technology Review points out, there are few more divisive figures than Montagnier, and his claims are flatly rejected by most mainstream biologists. PZ Myers memorably condemned the research as, "an awful paper that I would have shredded in a sea of red ink if it had come to me".

So what's new about the current arXiv report, and who would stick their neck out and be associated with furthering a theory that was met with such universal bile? Allan Windom is a theorist at Northeastern University in Boston who specialises in quantum field theory at the interface between high energy theory and condensed matter theory. Along with J. Swain, Y. Srivastava, and S. Sivasubramanian, he believes he may have solved one of the most controversial problems with Montagnier's theory, ie, there is no known mechanism by which bacteria can generate radio waves.

arXiv summarise their abstract (linked to below), as follows:

"Many types of bacterial DNA take the form of circular loops. So they've modelled the behaviour of free electrons moving around such a small loop, pointing out that, as quantum objects, the electrons can take certain energy levels. [They] calculate that the transition frequencies between these energy levels correspond to radio signals broadcast at 0.5, 1 and 1.5 kilohertz. And they point out that exactly this kind of signal has been measured in E Coli bacteria. [...] It is well known that bacterial and other types of cells use electromagnetic waves at higher frequencies to communicate as well as to send and store energy. If cells can also generate radio waves, there's no reason to think they wouldn't exploit this avenue too."

This is undoubtedly going to create a stir in the biological physics community, so stay tuned for more.

Source:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.3113
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26670/

Electron beams link Saturn with Enceladus

2011-04-22T17:47:00.002+02:00

More exceptionally exciting new research results from NASA's highly productive Cassini mission are being published in Nature this week.

A team of researchers, lead by University College London (UCL), have revealed that Enceladus, one of Saturn's diminutive moons, is linked to Saturn by powerful electrical currents - beams of electrons that flow back and forth between the planet and moon. The UCL announcement elucidates further:

"Since Cassini's arrival at Saturn in 2004 it has passed 500km-wide Enceladus 14 times, gradually discovering more of its secrets on each visit. Research has found that jets of gas and icy grains emanate from the south pole of Enceladus, which become electrically charged and form an ionosphere. The motion of Enceladus and its ionosphere through the magnetic bubble that surrounds Saturn acts like a dynamo, setting up the newly-discovered current system."

Scientists already knew that the giant planet Jupiter is linked to three of its moons by charged current systems set up by the satellites orbiting inside its giant magnetic bubble, the magnetosphere, and that these current systems form glowing spots in the planet's upper atmosphere. The latest discovery at Enceladus shows that similar processes take place at the Saturnian system too.

The detection of the beams was made by the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer's electron spectrometer, the design and building of which was led at UCL's Mullard Space Science Laboratory. UCL co-authors of the Nature paper, Dr Geraint Jones and Professor Andrew Coates, are delighted with this new finding.

Dr Jones said: "Onboard Cassini, only Cassini Plasma Spectrometer's electron spectrometer has the capability of directly detecting the electron beams at the energies they're seen; this finding marks a great leap forward in our understanding of what exactly is going on at mysterious Enceladus."

Professor Coates, added: "This now looks like a universal process - Jupiter's moon Io is the most volcanic object in the solar system, and produces a bright spot in Jupiter's aurora. Now, we see the same thing at Saturn - the variable and majestic water-rich Enceladus plumes, probably driven by cryovolcanism, cause electron beams which create a significant spot in Saturn's aurora too."

Source: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1104/11042001

Jodrell Bank selected for Square Kilometre Array

2011-04-04T21:02:00.002+02:00

Major news from the world of radio astronomy this week, as Jodrell Bank was chosen as the headquarters for the planning and construction of the long-awaited Square Kilometre Array radio telescope.

Set to be one of the great scientific endeavours of the 21st Century, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will be the world's largest and most sensitive radio telescope. Jodrell Bank beat off fierce competition from sites in Holland and Germany to be selected as the project headquarters. The SKA itself will be located in either Australia and New Zealand or Southern Africa.

The SKA will investigate fundamental unanswered questions about our Universe, including how the first stars and galaxies formed after the Big Bang, how galaxies have evolved since then, the role of magnetism in the cosmos, the nature of gravity, and the search for life beyond Earth.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the eminent radio astronomer who discovered pulsars at Jodrell Bank in 1967 had this to say:
"The power of this new telescope project is going to surpass anything we've seen before, enabling us to see many more radio-emitting stars and galaxies and pulling the curtains wide open on parts of the great beyond that radio astronomers like me have only ever dreamt of exploring."

Steve Rawlings of Oxford University hopes it might explain dark energy:
"The Square Kilometre Array is a time machine. As you look out to greater distances you're seeing the universe as it was when it was younger, and so you can map out the expansion of the universe. Dark energy seems to accelerate that expansion and so we will be able to map out dark energy and perhaps discover what it is."

Rather than being a huge single radio dish, it will be made up of thousands of smaller ones, which are distributed across vast geographical areas. A large array is needed because the wavelength of radio waves is far greater than that of visible light. "In order to get the same level of detail as a good optical telescope you'd need something 100km across. Clearly you can't build a single telescope a 100km across, but what you can do is build a network of telescopes and link those telescopes together." Simon Garrington, of Jodrell Bank explains.

Set to cost an estimated 1.5 billion Euros, this huge endeavour involves more than 70 institutes in 20 countries. The total collecting area will be approximately one square kilometre giving 50 times the sensitivity of the best current-day telescopes.

Sources:
http://www.skatelescope.org
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12891215