IdeaFestival

SEED profiles "revolutionary minds" working between sciences

Covering young pioneers in emerging scientific fields such as immunocomputing, stochastic biology, genetic acculturation, neuroarchaeology and astronomical medicine, SEED Magazine is running a terrific piece on how science increasingly "hybridizes" multiple fields of study, how insight so often happens between fields of study.

Seeing the article about how the concept of information is under new scrutiny because of insights derived from the study of the immune system brought to mind recent experiments confirming that "information" travels faster than the previous limit - the speed of light - between entangled particles hundreds of kilometers apart. 

SEED is also, of course, home to one of my favorite science writers, Jonah Lehrer, who will be at the IdeaFestival this month.

Wayne

Quantum entanglement exceeds speed (of light) limit

3quarksdaily: Scientists in Switzerland recently conducted another in a series of tests related to entanglement, the little understood quantum property whereby two entangled objects - in this case, photons - immediately share the same informational state once one of the objects is measured. In 2007 experiments, this "spooky action" was confirmed at a distance of 89 miles.

The Swiss test wanted to rate the speed at which this communication might take place. It turns out to be quite a bit faster than the speed of light, which raises questions about the nature of quantum communication since ordinary communication cannot exceed the universal speed limit of 186,000 miles per second.

In the everyday world, objects can organize themselves in just a few ways. For example, two people can coordinate their actions by talking directly with each other, or they can both receive instructions from a third source.

In both these cases, the information is communicated at or below the speed of light, in keeping with Einstein’s axiom that nothing in the Universe can go faster. But quantum mechanics allows for a third way to coordinate information (emphasis added)....

Scientific American - "Entanglement clocks in at 10,000 times the speed of light?" - has more on the story:

Theoretical physicist Terence Rudolph of Imperial College London, author of a commentary on the new paper, says that putting bounds on faster-than-light entanglement [which the Swiss experiment seems to have done] is useful for researchers trying to imagine theories that might extend beyond quantum mechanics.
 
What might such a theory look like? Rudolph says we're probably stuck with instantaneous entanglement, which seems impossible to us because we're stuck in everyday space and time. 'We need to understand how quantum mechanics sees space and time,' he says. 'I think there's probably much deeper issues.

In physics history, Einstein used the fact that communication was fast, but not infinitely fast, to question and to ultimately revolutionize Newtonian physics, which implied that gravitational effects were instantaneous over vast distances. Einstein's re-conception led to his spectacularly successful and empirically confirmed theories of special and general relativity, which show how space and time is a thing, bent and twisted.

In the current example, "quantum communication" may hint at limits subtler than those imposed by space and time, and, perhaps, at revolutions to come.

Wayne

Wikipedia: quantum entanglement

Galaxy Zoo collects ghostly specimen

Combing the archives of the Galaxy Zoo as a volunteer and unable to find a match for the object, an amateur Dutch astronomer has discovered  a one of kind light, a ghostly echo that may be entirely new to science.

In the past year 150,000 amateurs have helped classify more than 1 million galaxies as part of the Galaxy Zoo project. As Pamela Gay has suggested, astronomy is one of the rare science disciplines where amateurs can make significant contributions.

Wayne

Lakeside on Titan

This is an artist's conception of the only known body besides Earth with liquid water on the surface, Titan. Cassini scientists have concluded that at least one of the large lakes observed on Saturn's moon contains liquid hydrocarbons, and have positively identified ethane.

Wayne

Image credit: NASA/JPL

 

Springtime on Saturn

[Cross posted from the Kentucky Space blog] Having toured the Saturn system for four years now, the intrepid craft Cassini has snapped 150,000 images, discovered organics venting from Enceladus and dispatched Huygens to the surface of Titan, which, as we now know, is an organic chemistry factory with a complex hydrology that suggests something about the possibility of life.

That length of time has also enabled scientists to observe a very slow change in the northern pole. The blues and grays are are gradually diminishing in intensity as "winter gives way to spring."

Wayne

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Before the Big Bang?

In a blog post at the Foundational Questions Institute, William Orem is peeved by the idea that "nothingness" is an operable term when it comes to cosmological beginnings:

It’s at least worth noting that the word 'nothingness' itself contains a postulate that is by no means self-evident: namely, that '-ness' can meaningfully be attached to the term 'no-thing' in the way it might be attached to 'red' or 'happy.' When we agree to the attachment we are ceding the strange point that there is a state or condition of being in no state or condition, something very much like 'being not being.' Viewed this way, 'nothingness' appears to be a round square.

In a similar vein I would submit that the phrase 'emerged out of nothing' is grammatically sound but has no meaning, just as we can speak with perfect clarity but no content about a room full of married bachelors. The point is that the only quantum fluctuations with which we are familiar are embedded in spacetime, or are themselves expressions of spacetime, which we offhandedly refer to as 'nothingness' or 'emptiness' at our peril.

I'm certainly guilty of this, as astronomer Pamela Gay, a.k.a. "Star Stryder," has pointed out to me.

Thanks to some interesting new work that Orem points out, "what came before the Big Bang?" might someday be addressed. By clearing up a little semantic confusion, we are expanding not only what we know, but adding to what we know how to know.

I just picked up Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos, which I'm enjoying immensely.

Wayne

A Bounty of Super Earths

[cross-posted from Kentucky Space] Here is an artist's impression of the latest in a haul of planets from recent observations at the European Souther Observatory.

The image depicts a system of three "super-Earths" around the star HD 40307 in the constellation Pictor.

As detection techniques improve, the ability to potentially resolve exoplanets as small as Earth is becoming more likely, and, indeed, according to European astronomers about 45 new "Earth-like" planets have been uncovered by Harps, or the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher at the observatory in Chile. The new discoveries have the mass of three or four Earths.

Astronomers now believe that roughly thirty percent of the stars in the Milky Way may harbor such super-Earths, according to a New York Times article yesterday.

Scientific American has more.

Given the wealth of data being created by terrestrial observatories like Harps, space craft such as Kepler almost undoubtedly will find planets very similar in mass to our own within habitable orbits - orbits permitting the presence of liquid water - of their parent stars.

You and I are living in the Golden Age of planetary discovery.

Wayne

Earth-like exoplanets common?

Commenting on a story in the local paper about the discovery of a rocky exoplanet with four times the mass of Earth, Paul Gilster suggests that while this particular discovery awaits confirmation - its existence, not to mention its "habitability," or its potential to support life as we know it, is far from clear - the really big idea in the locally-reported news article is that rocky earth-like planets could outnumber Jupiter-type worlds three-to-one.

With the catalog of exoplanets growing steadily and new observational techniques now coming online, this story, as it were, is developing.

Wayne

Wikipedia: Exoplanets, Hot Jupiters