“‘If this can really be done, then G.E.’s work promises to be a huge advantage in commercializing holographic storage technology,’ said Bert Hesselink, a professor at Stanford and an expert in the field.” Scientists at GE develop a way to compress 500 gigs of information onto a standard disc, equivalent to 100 DVDs or 20 Blu-Rays. That should free up some shelf space. “The recent breakthrough by the team, working at the G.E. lab in Niskayuna, N.Y., north of Albany, was a 200-fold increase in the reflective power of their holograms, putting them at the bottom range of light reflections readable by current Blu-ray machines.”
Category: Physics
A Measure of Darkness.
“‘We’ve discovered this incredible dark energy, we don’t understand what the hell it is,’ said Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University. ‘It’s extremely small, extremely weak, and it’s so close to being zero, it’s just a total mystery why it should have this small value and not be zero.” While they’re still not entirely sure what in fact they’re looking at, Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicists announce they’ve found another way to measure and quantify “dark energy”, a.k.a. the repulsive “cosmological constant” force causing the universe to expand rather than contract. “This is a much-needed confirmation that the earlier work was correct, the astronomers said, comparing it to football referees examining a controversial play with multiple camera angles.“
As an added bonus, the results announced today also seem to confirm Einstein’s general theory of relativity. “‘It’s never been proved right on the scale of the observable universe,’ Spergel said.”
The Absence that Binds. | Follow the Bouncing Ball.
And, if that wasn’t heady enough news to wrap one’s mind around, see also this article on loop quantum cosmology (LQC) and “The Big Bounce.” “LQC has been tantalising physicists since 2003 with the idea that our universe could conceivably have emerged from the collapse of a previous universe. Now the theory is poised to make predictions we can actually test. If they are verified, the big bang will give way to a big bounce and we will finally know the quantum structure of space-time. Instead of a universe that emerged from a point of infinite density, we will have one that recycles, possibly through an eternal series of expansions and contractions, with no beginning and no end.” (Both links via Dangerous Meta.)
Dawn of the Particle Age.
“It’s really a generation that we’ve been looking forward to this moment, and the moments that will come after it in particular. September 10 is a demarcation between finishing the construction and starting to turn it on, but the excitement will only continue to grow.” A Quantum Leap Forward, or the End of Days? (Answer: The former.) Over on the border of France and Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider — the giant, multi-billion-dollar particle accelerator decades in the making — gets ready for its first big test on Wednesday (as does its accompanying “Grid”.) “The collider will recreate the conditions of less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, when there was a hot ‘soup’ of tiny particles called quarks and gluons, to look at how the universe evolved, said John Harris, U.S. coordinator for ALICE, a detector specialized to analyze that question.“
No ship that small has a cloaking device…
“‘It’s very deep, like in a forest on the darkest night,’ said Shawn-Yu Lin, a scientist who helped create the material at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. ‘Nothing comes back to you. It’s very, very, very dark.‘” Dick Cheney’s soul? Tonight’s lunar eclipse? No, a great leap forward in “transformational optics”…and invisibility cloaks. The “paper-thin material…absorbs 99.955 percent of the light that hits it, making it by far the darkest substance ever made — about 30 times as dark as the government’s current standard for blackest black.”
My God, It’s Full of Brains.
“It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science. If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.“
In today’s NYT, Dennis Overbye attempts to explain the Boltzmann Brain problem, a theoretical puzzle causing consternation among cosmologists. “‘It is part of a much bigger set of questions about how to think about probabilities in an infinite universe in which everything that can occur, does occur, infinitely many times,’ said Leonard Susskind of Stanford, a co-author of a paper in 2002 that helped set off the debate. Or as Andrei Linde, another Stanford theorist given to colorful language, loosely characterized the possibility of a replica of your own brain forming out in space sometime, ‘How do you compute the probability to be reincarnated to the probability of being born?’”
Um, yeah. The graphic sorta helps explain what may be going on: Minute fluctuations in the universe’s general move towards entropy create random pockets of order, some of which could hypothetically organize as floating brains, or pocket universes or whales and flowerpots too, I suppose. Or something like that…Now my brain hurts.
Undone by The Great Eye.
Have we inadvertently killed Schrodinger’s cat? No, it’s much, much worse. Cosmologists at Case Western Reserve and Vanderbilt speculate that mankind may have hastened the end of the universe by observing dark energy in 1998. “[Q]uantum theory says that whenever we observe or measure something, we could stop it decaying due what is what is called the ‘quantum Zeno effect,’ which suggests that if an ‘observer’ makes repeated, quick observations of a microscopic object undergoing change, the object can stop changing – just as a watched kettle never boils…Prof Krauss says that the measurement of the light from supernovae in 1998, which provided evidence of dark energy, may have reset the decay of the void to zero — back to a point when the likelihood of its surviving was falling rapidly. ‘In short, we may have snatched away the possibility of long-term survival for our universe and made it more likely it will decay,’ says Prof Krauss.” D’oh! But wouldn’t this presume that at no other place or time in our unfathomably gigantic universe did any other civilization make the same observations? Given the odds of intelligent life out there, that seems unlikely. (And, if you think this all sounds goofy and ridiculous, just wait until we get to the multiverse…)
The Atlantic Sesquicentennial.
“In The Atlantic’s very first issue, in 1857, the magazine’s founders — an illustrious group that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell — declared that they would dedicate their new publication to monitoring the development, and advancing the cause, of what they called ‘the American idea.’ And for the last century and a half, the magazine has been preoccupied with the fundamental subjects of the American experience: war and peace, science and religion, the conundrum of race, the role of women, the plight of the cities, the struggle to preserve the environment, the strengths and failings of our politics, and especially, America’s proper place in the world.” To commemorate the magazine’s 150th anniversary, The Atlantic Monthly publishes The American Idea, an anthology of articles which includes republished writings by TR, W.E.B. DuBois, Albert Einstein, John Muir, Helen Keller, and Vannevar Bush. (Alas, only ten of the included articles are online.)
They Blinded Me With Science.
The source of that Hawaii link above deserves its own posting: DISCOVER magazine presents the Top 100 science stories of 2006.
On the Dark Side.
Using the thankfully soon-to-be-refurbished Hubble, astronomers find more evidence of “dark energy” in the early universe working along the lines of Einstein’s famous fudge factor, the cosmological constant, to combat a gravitational crunch. “‘Dark energy makes us nervous,’ said Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology who was not involved in the supernova study. ‘It fits the data, but it’s not what we really expected.’“