The Higgs Boson is big news today.

We found it.

We are close to finding it.

We have surrounded it are are now waiting for a list of it’s demands.

But if you’re someone who has no idea what a hell a Higgs Boson is, how are you supposed to get excited? Don’t be the quiet one at the table during your next D&D campaign! Watch the above video.

Added bonus, a fat man terrorizes kids in a pool during the explanation.

[YouTube]

The crew invents a new form of inter-species prejudice, declares their willingness to do stupid things in the name of science and then goes metaphysical.

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Researcher Masahiro Hotta at Tohoku University has developed a framework by which it could be possible to teleport energy vast distances. The implications for this are pretty amazing. Could we use this to power deep space missions? Teleport power from the sun? Build a Death Star? One can dream.

He gives the example of a string of entangled ions oscillating back and forth in an electric field trap, a bit like Newton’s balls. Measuring the state of the first ion injects energy into the system in the form of a phonon, a quantum of oscillation. Hotta says that performing the right kind of measurement on the last ion extracts this energy. Since this can be done at the speed of light (in principle), the phonon doesn’t travel across the intermediate ions so there is no heating of these ions. The energy has been transmitted without traveling across the intervening space. That’s teleportation.

link: Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Physicist Discovers How to Teleport Energy

According to an article from the October 1936 issue of Modern Mechanix, invisibility wasn’t just a possibility, it was a reality. The author credulously reports a description of an invisibility ray, but states emphatically that, “This is no illusion done by some magician, no trick of mirrors, it is asserted, but an actual performance of a new device which produces and projects what, for lack of a better name, may be called an ‘invisible ray.’”

Read the description of the potential applications and decide for yourself…

SUPPOSE that out onto a stage come eight chorus girls performing an intricate dance. Gradually something seems to happen, the heads, faces, and upper parts of the bodies of the girls seem to be disappearing. In fact, little by little they do become invisible to the audience until at last only eight pairs of legs are seen gracefully skipping about on the stage in perfect rhythm. You rub your eyes and begin to think you’d better see an oculist right away, but while you are worrying about it, back into your vision come the eight girls, wholly there and dancing gaily as though they had not just given you the shock of a lifetime. Or suppose again that a girl is sitting atop a piano, singing. The piano begins to fade from sight; finally the girl is left sitting in midair, nonchalantly swinging her feet and blithely singing, as though her perch was perfectly substantial.

If you did not think that you were just “seeing things,” right off you’d say, “Some invisible wires, or anyway, a cleverly arranged set of mirrors.” But you would be wrong in your guess. At least so says Mr. Adam Gosztonyi, the inventor of a machine which he claims can accomplish just such disappearing acts as have been described.

For something that’s not a magician’s trick, it’s kind of odd that all of the theoretical applications are theatrical in nature.

At that same time an illusion known as Pepper’s Ghost and the Blue Room was well known to magicians. It did *exactly* the same thing as described in the demonstration and under the same conditions. Check out a YouTube video here of a historic recreation of the effect (two facts: 1. It uses a mirror. 2. I’ve touched it).

In defense of the Modern Mechanix reporter, it’s a really awesome effect.

link: Modern Mechanix Invisibility At Last Within Grasp of Man

Super-heavy element 112 is now on the scene, more than ten years since it’s creation at the Center for Heavy Ion Research in Germany. And it needs a name. Internet sensation Professor Richard Wiseman believes it should be called Kryptonite, and has started a campaign on his blog to make it so.

If you ask us, it’s about damn time someone put kryptonite on the periodic table. To get on board with the campaign please post your support on his site, and together we can make our universe a little more like the Superman universe.

Note: This won’t change much for the majority of the population, who always thought that kryptonite was an element anyway.

Saturn’s North Pole (Cassini-Huygens, 2007 and 2008)

In November 1980, planetary scientists eagerly examined transmissions received from the Voyager 1 spacecraft as it sped past Saturn. And with good reason! Amid those transmissions was the first image of Saturn’s North Pole – a region that’s virtually impossible to see from Earth, and, depending on the degree by which Saturn is tilted, can be cloaked in darkness for up to 15 years at a time (and you thought your last winter was never going to end).

What those scientists saw, and later missions confirmed, was a decidedly bizarre feature in the gas giant’s atmosphere directly above the North Pole: a 15,000-mile-wide hexagon.

At this point, before we lose all but Weird Thing’s distinguished geometry geek readership (you know who you are, you magnificent bastards), it’s worth pointing out that hexagons naturally occur all over the place: basalt columns; beehive honeycombs; snowflakes; and even molecules offer some examples. Unfortunately the processes responsible for these formations by no means explain the feature on Saturn.  In fact, the planet’s thick atmosphere is one of the last places experts were prepared to find such a geometric oddity – even its South Pole has a reassuringly circular, terrifyingly enormous hurricane churning up the clouds.

A Comparison of Saturn’s Poles (Cassini-Huygens, 2008)

So why is it there? Besides dropping Jodie Foster – or, ideally, Matthew McConaughey – into the middle of the 60-mile-deep hexagon and seeing where she goes, a slightly less exciting experiment conducted by the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark provided some intriguing results. And by slightly less exciting, we mean they stirred a bucket of water. What they found was that at certain speeds the water flow would interact with the edges of the cylindrical container to create rotating polygons with up to 6 corners.

As you may have already guessed, the experiment has a long way to go before it explains Saturn’s hexagon. For one thing, a colossal bucket isn’t sitting at the North Pole to provide distinct boundaries for the planet’s many complex layers of clouds to interact. Scientists have yet to figure out precisely how Saturn is creating a similar result with its multifaceted toolkit of jet streams and waves. Perhaps a more relevant explanation may be found in satellite observations of Hurricane Isabel (PDF) from 2003, wherein the storm’s eyewall alternated between pentagonal and hexagonal formations through unique combinations of smaller rotational features called mesovortices; showing us that even home grown storms can test and inevitably improve our equations of motion.

Satellite Observations of Hurricane Isabel in 2003 (PDF)

We’ll probably have plenty of time to figure out Saturn’s hexagon though. One of the most profound mysteries surrounding the formation (second only to its existence in the first place) is that it has stuck around as a stable feature in the 29 years or so since Voyager first observed it. As Saturn is currently in the unhurried process of tilting its North Pole towards the sun, scientists can soon point the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft’s superior optical instruments at the newly illuminated region to assist the relentless effort to discover answers (or more questions). Until then, we hope you’ll join us in simply appreciating this hexagon as one of the many weird things that makes our universe even more fascinating.

A five-part series that tries to explain how to make the science of Star Trek real…

Probably the most fascinating idea that Star Trek popularized was the idea of a warp drive. This was a concept from golden age sci-fi that went mainstream via Trek as space-age audiences became sophisticated enough to realize that NASA’s fastest rockets wouldn’t take you very far in a human lifetime. Even going the speed of light wouldn’t work for a show that tried to visit more than one star system in it’s 3 season run (due to time dilation your characters could visit those places, but their friends back on earth would be long dead). What was needed was a (plot) device that allowed you to visit distant planets in the time it takes to drive to the next state.

Since Star Trek, warp drive has become a part of public consciousness. It’s a theoretical form of technology that some feel is as inevitable as AI and teleportation.

There’s one big catch; while AI (or something that acts like it) seems to be a problem solved at some point on a graph projecting the development of intelligent systems and teleportation seems to be more of an energy problem, there’s not a viable theory for how a warp drive could work (exotic matter, worm holes, Alcubierre drives etc.) that doesn’t violate the laws of physics (as we know them) or result in some equation balancing phenomenon like a “quantum scream” (an obscure term used in an equally obscure paper on the subject).

But despair not. There could be a much simpler solution to getting to faraway planets quickly in a short amount of time. It might have to do with the fact that when we look at distant galaxies or study the acceleration of space probes beyond our solar system we see some strange stuff that falls outside our theoretical framework. Galaxies are moving faster than they should. Our space probes seem to be accelerating faster than they should (although this one might be just a measuring problem). There’s a variety of theories to explain this. None of them dominate.

If space itself is dimpled like a golf ball, traveling in a straight line is usually not the best option to get from one point to another. The fastest path is the one that avoids going into the valleys created by the dimples – but not too far out of the way.

Every particle in the universe makes a dimple in space. This dimple effects matter and light. Light from our second closest star is slowed down ever so slightly by the dimples caused by the various particles between it and us. Even a total vacuum suffers quantum fluctuations that cause these dimples.

Depending upon how significant the effect this dimpling has and how much it occurs on a galactic scale, we might have to rethink how we measure distance between stars. A star five light years away might be reachable in less time going less than the speed of light if there was a way to take a route that avoided most of the dimpling. This might be a route only a subatomic particle could take and it might only shave .0000000000000001 milliseconds off the total trip time, but it’s a start. And if it turns out that those dimples have dimples, then there might be an even bigger time savings.

While that’s not a whole lot to hope for right now and nowhere near as sexy to think about as a magical warp engine, it’s a helpful frame of reference for understanding how faster than light travel may not mean going faster than the speed of light.

Finding a way to get to distant star systems might not come from waiting for our existing theories to be overturned to satisfy our wishes. It might just come from studying the phenomenon at hand and better understanding how it all works together.

Check out the rest of the series on making the science of Star Trek possible

A five-part series that tries to explain how to make the science of Star Trek real…

In an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation called the “The Chase” a long running problem in Star Trek was finally solved – Why do all the aliens in Star Trek look humanoid. The answer was not “budget”. It was that a race that lived 4.5 billion years ago seeded the galaxy with its DNA. Humans, Vulcans, klingons etc., all got their imprint from them. We kind of look like each other because we all look like some alien race from 4.5 billion years ago. Problem solved. But is Intelligent Design really a satisfying answer?

If we find aliens that look like us, what other explanations could account for them?

Kidnapping
Having to deal with a slightly more sophisticated audience that grew up watching Star Trek, the producers of Stargate and the producers of the television series had to come up with a simple explanation for there being humans all over the galaxy in present day time. Their solution was a popular one in sci-fi literature: We were kidnapped. Over the last 100,000 years humans have been relocated to the distant corners of our universe. Once there, they go about their business. Building monuments to their gods (Star Trek and Stargate) or becoming thriving interstellar civilizations more advanced than us on earth (Iain Banks’s The Culture).

Plastic surgery
Let’s face it, we’re one sexy species. Of course we’re biologically programmed to think this, otherwise evolution would come to a stand still if we spent all our time trying to reproduce with some other species just as sexy in its own way (like sexy, sexy moss). But lets assume that we’re universally considered sexy. Then it makes sense that sophisticated civilizations would want to look like us – or at least some of them would. History is replete with examples of one culture adopting the style of another (sometimes less sophisticated one); Romans copying Egyptian fashion. Revolutionary France emulating the American Frontiersmen and Native Americans. British punks emulating Caribbean culture and Native American, etc.

Shape-shifting
Any civilization that can travel interstellar distances should also possess the ability to shift shape. We can do this in some small form through surgery and prosthetics. Eventually, nanotechnology should give us the ability to radically change our shapes, colors and features. It’s not impossible to think that if we ever meet some other species we might adopt their shape to fit in just like we do the wardrobe of other countries. Because nothing screams tourist on Epsilon XII like only one pair of arms and concealed genitals.

Coincidence
This is a hard one to accept initially. Our planet is filled with billions of different life forms. The only ones that ever came close to looking like us are distant relatives. But given a universe filled with over 70 sextillion stars (that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars), if intelligent life happens a lot and knowing that nature favors certain solutions (eyes, wings, flippers, feet) it’s not too hard to accept that somewhere out there are a lot of roughly humanoid looking species. But for every one of those would be a billion squidlings that think we’re very unsexy.

Synchronicity
This is a concept used in sci-fi to explain why patterns often repeat themselves. It’s not a matter of coincidence, it’s that there’s some property of the universe that makes systems move to the same metronome. A kind of galactic zeitgeist. In pop culture there have been a number of crank theories like Morphic-Resonance and The Hundredth Monkey that try to prove this. They fail because their own examples are easily debunked. They try to explain phenomena that don’t require a sophisticated explanation and supply a mechanism without really saying what it is.

Ignoring the crackpot examples, there are other examples of synchronicity fully understood and some that aren’t. Quantum entanglement is one form of it. It’s spooky action at a distance shows how previously connected particles are still mysteriously connected. Since the universe started out as a tiny point, we’re all connected in some way. In more mundane physics you can do fun experiments with tuning forks and other objects and observe how similar shapes can make each other resonate at a distance.

If at some level matter can influence other matter at a far off distance like two tuning forks, then maybe that influence can scale up to systems and cause co-evolution over similar paths. This could result in humanoids in the most far off places. For a great exploration of this idea, check out Anathem by Neil Stephenson.

Check out the rest of the series on making the science of Star Trek possible

A five-part series that tries to explain how to make the science of Star Trek real…

Time Travel stories generally suck. There are some noteworthy exceptions – specifically stories that deal with the problems of time travel and not just time travel as a plot device (Primer, Back to the Future, to name a few).

Star Trek has done some great and some very bad time travel stories. Story merits aside, there’s one big problem with most time travel stories; Transmitting people back in time (information) has no theoretical basis: It’s impossible. For every worm hole propped open with exotic matter or giant Tippler tube, someone always finds an equation to show how the universe corrects itself with quantum screams, bubbles or other annoyances that get in the way of us correcting that horrible thing that happened in 6th grade or saving the whales.

Assuming for a moment that the killjoys at MIT and Princeton who relish in pointing out that time travel as we understand it is impossible, then what? How can we tell scientifically literate time travel stories?

Fake universe
If the universe is really just a computer program and we’re just AI running around in as described in countless sci-fi stories, the Matrix and a few Star Trek episodes; then anything is possible. Traveling back in time is like finding a cheat code on a video game that lets you hop around levels in a game. Real time travel is still impossible but time travel for people in the simulation is totally possible. What are the odds that we’re in a quantum computer simulation? Frightenly good according to the Harter equation (see footnote).

Sideways time travel
If we’re not all in a computer simulation, then maybe the way to go back in time is to go sideways into a parallel universe that’s a mirror of our own but just a few milliseconds behind us and keep going universe to universe until you get to the time you want. Assuming that the multi-worlds theory of Quantum Mechanics is correct and that our universe branches off every time there’s a quantum event, then there could be an infinite number of universes like our own progressing back to the big bang because some of them got a little later start then us. Of course this isn’t time travel into our own timeline. But it’s traveling into a past similar to our own. You can kill all you distant relatives without repercussions (besides trifling moral ones).

Change the present to the past
The beautiful premise in Alex Proyas’s film Dark City was that the clock could be rolled back and timelines altered by simply putting people to sleep and then moving things where you wanted and implanting memories. No time machine required. Just rewrite the calendar and get everyone to subscribe to a collective delusion and create physical evidence.

Sound crazy? Our whole calendar is based upon a bunch of guys in funny robes changing our timeline to agree to a religious point of view. We’re a couple weeks out of sync with natural history because of this! Totalitarian regimes in Soviet Russia, China and North Korea constantly changed their timelines to whatever was politically convenient.

Take this a step further and imagine some kind of technology that doesn’t so much allow you to travel back in time, as much as roll-back the odometer on everything else around you. This would require knowing where things go and repositioning atoms into a prior arrangement to precisely fit the period you wanted to go. It’d be a tremendous undertaking, but it’s an engineering problem and not one of fundamental physics. This may or may not have been the device that saved the day in Galaxy Quest.

Going even further out on the fringe, if every particle has a memory, maybe there’s a way to knock everything into a past state. This might be something that can just be done locally or on a planetary scale. Figuring out how to account for all the particles that fell out of the region could be complicated. Your atoms were doing other things before they became you…

Simulate just the parts you want
We already do this to an extent. Video games, movies and Renaissance fairs are all attempts to recreate a part of the past. They’re all getting more and more sophisticated. At some point you’ll be able to walk the streets of ancient Rome in some way or another and it will be just as real to your senses as having been there. While this won’t let you wreak havoc on the present, it can allow you to fulfill your suppressed power fantasies by allowing you to use your 21st century knowledge to try to take over the ancient world, acquire a harem and build monuments in your own honor. And isn’t that what this is all really about?

Check out the rest of the series on making the science of Star Trek possible

Footnote:
The Harter Equation: *If* it’s possible to make a quantum computer that can describe a reality equal to or greater than our own universe in detail, and *if* it’s possible to create an infinite number of simulated universes with this level of detail, the chance that our universe is actually a quantum simulation would be nearly infinite*. There would be infinitely more artificial universes (that think they’re real) than real ones. Now if an artificial universes (like our own?) can create other artificial universes, the chances that we’re an original universe becomes even more implausible.

A five-part series that tries to explain how to make the science of Star Trek real…

An important part of the Star Trek mythos is the idea of mind-to-mind contact. Spock uses this to probe other people’s minds and even transplant his entire consciousness. Counselor Troi used it to read the feelings of other species. It’s a wonderful concept that has fascinated people since at least the 1800’s. Unfortunately, we’re no closer to it being real now then we were back then.

We can imagine all sorts of technology assisted ways to make this real, but there’s nothing sexy about your Vulcan girlfriend asking you to step into an fMRI so she can read your voxels (okay, maybe a little sexy). What we need are some organic solutions or explanations for brain to brain transmission that make the concept a little more plausible.

Pheromones
Pheromones are chemical signals that animals use to influence one another and convey certain kinds of information like mating availability and even directions. The amount that humans are controlled by them is up for debate. Yet, we know they’re there and we know they have some effect – especially when it comes to reproduction.

At its simplest, a pheromone is a chemical emitted by one animal that tells another animal’s brain (usually via the nose) some piece of information. While individual pheromone’s may not say a whole lot, they may be more complex than Chinese pictographs and capable of communicating more information than our spoken communication.

If an organism could control what pheromones it gave off (like we do sound in speech) and another organism could discern the details (like we do with hearing), a whole new level of non-verbal communication is made possible. This is even more practical than mind viruses (see below) and something you can readily experiment with. We’d love to hear from someone who has built a Wi-Fi system based on scent.

Mind viruses
Information is transmitted from mind to mind all the time without overt forms of communication. Animals that inherit their instincts get their instructions from coding in their DNA. Viruses can jump bits of DNA from one organism to another. Our own DNA is filled with examples of this. Some speculate that up to 50% of the DNA in us was left there by viruses.

If we can all agree that animals (including us) can inherit information (patterns in the brain) that predispose us a certain way and we can agree that viruses can alter our DNA, it’s at least possible for an organism to use DNA as a way to shuttle information back and forth between different brains. So when Spock puts his hands on your face in that Vulcan mind meld of his, he’s really just passing on some mind infection to you.

Who knows how effective of a mode of transmitting information this would be. It might be worse than a fax machine from 1960. Or how well it would work between two different people, let alone two different species from different planets. At least it’s a mechanism that may already be in place to some degree.

Magnetoception
When most skeptics approach the idea of telepathy, stock answer number one is how complex the brain is how all our brains are laid out differently. Forgetting for the moment that recent research has shown that we can pinpoint thoughts and decisions much more precisely than we thought; it doesn’t matter how different our brains are. We have parts of our brain dedicated to sorting that out and communicating with the rest of the world. All you need to do is send a request for information to that spot to get your response. Think of a spy on sodium thiopental. This truth serum works (kinda, sort of) because it affects a part of the brain that’s semi-conscious and not self censoring.

Now all we need is a nonverbal, non-chemical way tap into that part of the brain. Maybe it’s already there. Bee’s, sharks, birds and now apparently cows can all sense magnetic fields due to the presence of a magnetic organic compound called magnetite (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7213948). In the laboratory we can send signals to the parts of their brains that control their magnetoception and screw up their sense of direction. Studies in humans have been inconclusive yet we apparently have deposits of magnetite in our noses. At some point on our evolutionary path we likely had magnetoception to some degree.

A biologist wanting to give us the ability to read minds needs to first increase our ability to sense magnetic fields (tweaking a gene sequence or two) and then give us a controlled way to transmit. It could be a matter of giving a part of our brain that involves speech control over a muscle or organ (other than our tongue) that can generate really strong EMF waves (stronger than the ones our body already produces). Maybe some eel genes could help. Maybe there’s already coding for that.

The end product is a human that can naturally transmit and receive thoughts through electromagnetic radiation just like a cell phone or a radio – without the need for either.

Check out the rest of the series on making the science of Star Trek possible

This video over at tenthdimension.com blew our minds when we first saw it. It is a lucid and concise guide to visualizing ten dimensional string theory from our humble four dimensional perspective. Mind boggling stuff.

-Or watch it on youtube.

The classic novel Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott is a great primer for visualizing multiple-dimensions.