Xenophilia Plays Arco Arena, 5:30 PM Tuesday, 9/9/2008. Black Hole Swallows the Earth: 9/10/2008?

Many experiments go wrong. If the Big Bang Machine experiment goes wrong, the entire Earth could disappear in a nanosecond this coming Wednesday, 9/10/2008.

Luckily, this is the day AFTER Xenophilia plays the Arco Arena, in Sacramento CA (as foretold by prophesy 10 years ago) … and the day before the anniversary of the attacks of 9/11, so we will not have to re-live the whole thing again.

So, why not join us. What possible better thing do you have to do on the day before the end of the world? Come see some music and basketball. We have only a handful of special $10 lower level seat tickets left.

Actually, due to the time difference–or someone just running an early test–it may be that as we hit our last chord (even before the basketball game begins)… right as we hit our last A11th chord, THAT is when it will happen. We will all vanish, painlessly and instantly, and nothing that ever happened on the Earth will have mattered.

If we all survive and the experiment goes right, however, we might understand how the entire universe was created.

The most powerful physics experiment ever built, the Large Hadron Collider will re-create the conditions just after the Big Bang in an attempt to answer fundamental questions of science and the universe itself.

On September 10th, CERN - the largest centre of particle physics research in the world, will switch on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and in the process begin arguably the most ambitious science experiment ever undertaken. This “Big Bang Machine” will recreate conditions just a billionth of a second after the big bang and in the process may answer some of the most profound questions about our universe and how it all began.

By smashing particles together at speeds 99.99% the speed of light, scientists hope to answer some of the greatest mysteries in particle physics. What is mass? What is dark matter - the invisible but massive substance that fills the universe? Why is there no antimatter ? Are extra dimensions and parallel universes science fact rather than science fiction? - bbc

Personally, before the end, I had hoped for a big discovery, like one of the following being shown to definitely exist: Aliens, bigfoot, chupacabras, or cold fusion. What have I been doing to prepare to be consumed by a black hole? Cleaning mostly. You?

Here is a bit of trivia. What is a hadron?

In particle physics, a hadron … is a bound state of quarks. Hadrons are held together by the strong nuclear force, similar to how atoms are held together by the electromagnetic force. The best-known hadrons are protons and neutrons. - wiki

In case I don’t see you at the show, so long. We had fun, didn’t we? Thanks for reading my blog.

PS. Perhaps we will all emerge in another universe as we are ejected from a white hole somewhere.

Meta-materials Mimic Ice And Illuminate Why Water-ice Doesn’t Fully Conform To Third Law Of Thermodynamics

“Ye canna change the laws of physics!” Scotty warned Captain Kirk on “Star Trek.” But engineers and physicists at the University of Maryland may rewrite one of them.

The Third Law of Thermodynamics is on the minds of John Cumings, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering, and his research group as they examine the crystal lattice structure of ice and seek to define exactly what happens when it freezes.

…

The Third Law of Thermodynamics states that as the temperature of a pure substance moves toward absolute zero (the mathematically lowest temperature possible) its entropy, or the disorderly behavior of its molecules, also approaches zero. The molecules should line up in an orderly fashion.

Ice seems to be the exception to that rule. While the oxygen atoms in ice freeze into an ordered crystalline structure, its hydrogen atoms do not.

“The hydrogen atoms stop moving,” Cumings explains, “but they just stop where they happen to lie, in different configurations throughout the crystal with no correlation between them, and no single one lowers the energy enough to take over and reduce the entropy to zero.”

So is the Third Law truly a law, or more of a guideline? … Materials that violated the Third Law as originally written were found in the 1930s, mainly non-crystalline substances such as glasses and polymers. The Third Law was rewritten to say that all pure crystalline materials’ entropy moves toward zero as their temperatures move toward absolute zero. Ice is crystalline—but it seems only its oxygen atoms obey the Law. Over extremely long periods of time and at extremely low temperatures, however, ice may fully order itself, but this is something scientists have yet to prove. … continued on science daily

Invisibility Cloak only a few hundred years away….

Scientists say they are a step closer to developing materials that will render people and other objects invisible.

Researchers say they can redirect light around three-dimensional objects using metamaterials–artificially engineered structures created at a nano scale that contain optical properties not found in nature, according to an Associated Press report.

People see objects as a result of the light reflecting or scattering off them. This new mixture of materials has “negative refractive” properties that keep light from being absorbed or reflected by the object, allowing only the light from behind the object to be seen. Essentially, the material bends visible light in a way that eliminates the creation of reflections or shadows in much the way water flows around a stone. .. The research, which was funded in part by the U.S. Army Research Office and the National Science Foundation’s Nano-Scale Science and Engineering Center, could have broad applications, including for the military. - cnet

Only 33 days until the Earth is destroyed by a man made black hole?

People love to hear about the end of the world. Strangely, studies show that even when end of the world prophesies do not come true, people’s faith in the prophet increases. So, I am predicting that many small black holes will be created by the LHC and that these will eat the earth.

See the source for the count down.

CERN¹ has today announced that the first attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be made on 10 September. - cern

Some say the black hole, if it grows out of control, should only swallow France and Switzerland.

Okay people, listen very carefully, because this might well be the most valuable piece of information you will receive — we are all GOING TO DIE.

And, typically, it’s all the fault of those pesky scientists. … I’m referring, of course, to the CERN project in Switzerland, a pan-European adventure into the heart of particle acceleration. The largest scientific experiment ever conducted, the project has seen the construction of the world’s biggest Large Hadron Collider which will produce extremely high-energy collisions between particles of Hadron — large, fundamental particles largely composed of Quarks — in a huge, 27 kilometre subterranean circular tunnel which winds its way through France and Switzerland.

The experiment is designed to spin these particles in opposite directions, gathering speed with each circuit of the tunnel before the scientists smash the oncoming particles together at huge speeds, as they search for greater understanding of the inner workings of the particles.

… what’s the danger posed by what is a fascinating, if rather baffling, experiment?

Well, the scientists are actually hoping to discover the so-called ‘God particle’, the Higgs boson, which grants mass to all other particles. Oh, and they will also create a mini-black hole every second during the experiment. And this, not surprisingly, has some people completely freaked out.

Critics of the project are convinced that creating so many black holes in such a confined space could accidentally engineer a perfect storm of black holes, where rather than appearing and disappearing within a micro-second of their creation, they actually start to attach themselves to each other.

Then, gaining cumulative strength and intensity, they would eventually become large enough to be self-sustainable and then, of course, they would expand, first sucking the CERN research facility into the abyss before ultimately gaining exponential strength and devouring the entire world.

Of course, the fact that you’re reading this on a Monday morning means the prospect of the entire world being sucked into a black hole might not seem such a distressing idea. - independent

Large black holes evaporate when they get too big (five solar masses?). They give off heat, x-rays and gamma rays. If our solar system were in the path of a black hole’s gamma rays, it could be bad news for life. According to HowStuffWorks, a large enough gamma ray burst (GRB) could superheat the atmosphere and obliterate the ozone layer, destroying almost every living thing on the planet. If a burst from a source (say a star 6,000 light years away) lasted 20 seconds, some of the only survivors would be deep sea creatures because the water would provide some shielding from the sun’s radiation. Luckily, all GRB’s we’ve observed are at least 2 billion light years away.

Until next month the nearest black hole (2000, space.com) is V 4641, part of a micro-quasar between 3 to 10 solar masses at a paltry 1,600 light-years from Earth on the way to the center of the Milky Way in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. Recall that a light-year is 5.88 trillion miles.

Next month, in Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN begins operation. If we are lucky, it will create micro black-holes and confirm Hawking Radiation and the existence of several other sub-atomic particles and move us closer towards unifying quantum theory and relativity, and explaining everything. If we aren’t so lucky (because Hawking was incorrect), it will create micro black-holes which will combine, and survive long enough to start sucking in nearby matter, leading to a chain reaction which devoures the whole Earth. But that probably won’t happen so there is no need to worry about it….

Nearest black-hole? In a month or so, possibly just a few thousand miles away, for a pico-second or so. - PrinceGaz

The Science Behind Owning a Universe

“At the level of subatomic particles the world is governed by quantum physics. Quantum theory is the most successful scientific theory ever: more successful than Newton’s laws or Einstein’s relativity! The evidence that it correctly describes reality is simply overwhelming.

Yet quantum theory is very strange and goes against most of our fundamental beliefs about reality. We tend to think that at any moment things are located in one definite position. Quantum theory has proven that for sub atomic particles this is not in fact the case. They only take on a definite location when observed. Unobserved their position is described by a wave function of probabilities. In everyday English this means that when nobody is looking they simultaneously exist in all the positions they can possibly be in!

This strange quality of our fundamental reality is perfectly brought out by the example of Schroedinger’s cat. A cat is placed in a box that contains a vial of poison, which is released by the decay of a radioactive element. There is a 50/50 chance that the radioactive element will decay and release the poison, thus killing the cat. Since the decay of the radioactive element is determined by quantum theory it must simultaneously have decayed and not decayed. Only observation would fix one of the two possibilities. But this means the poison has been both released and not released! So until someone looks the cat in the box is both dead and alive!

Obviously a cat cannot be both dead and alive simultaneously. The best explanation is that two separate universes are created, one with a dead cat, one with a live cat. In fact, for every position of every sub atomic particle an alternate universe is created. While the number of universes created may not be infinite it is certainly very, very, large, unimaginably so.

We of course only inhabit one of the universes and with present technology cannot travel to others. But a breakthrough in quantum physics that allows us to travel to another universe could happen at any time. It may even be more likely than interstellar travel, which looks increasingly unlikely at any time in the near future.

Now you know that The Authority for Universe Ownership is firmly based on the most successful scientific theory ever what are you waiting for? Sign up and purchase your very own personalised universe.” - your universe

In a parallel universe you already own your own universe … without paying $9,999.00 to this joker … but don’t tell him I let the cat out of the box … uh, bag.

Where did all the anti-matter go?

Today, physicists conducting the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), a Department of Energy laboratory operated by Stanford University, announced exciting new results demonstrating a dramatic difference in the behavior of matter and antimatter …

When the universe began with the big bang, matter and antimatter were present in equal amounts. But all observations indicate that we live in a universe made only of matter. What happened to the antimatter?

Subtle differences between the behavior of matter and antimatter must be responsible for the matter-antimatter imbalance that developed in our universe. -sd

“Our universe is made up almost completely of matter. While we’re entirely used to this idea, this does not agree with our ideas of how mass and energy interact. According to these theories there should not be enough mass to enable the formation of stars and hence life.”

“In our standard model of particle physics, matter and antimatter are almost identical. Accordingly as they mix in the early universe they annihilate one another leaving very little to form stars and galaxies. The model does not come close to explaining the difference between matter and antimatter we see in the nature. The imbalance is a trillion times bigger than the model predicts.”

Sevior says that this inconsistency between the model and the universe implies there is a new principle of physics that we haven’t yet discovered.

“Together with our colleagues in the Belle experiment, based at KEK in Japan, we have produced vast numbers of B mesons with the world’s most intense particle collider.”

“We then looked at how the B-mesons decay as opposed to how the anti-B-mesons decay. What we find is that there are small differences in these processes. While most of our measurements confirm predictions of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, this new result appears to be in disagreement.”

“It is a very exciting discovery because our paper provides a hint as to what the new principle of physics is that led to our Universe being able to support life.” -sd

Particles Retain Weight for Billions of Years

Unlike most of us, subatomic particles don’t gain weight as they get older. The mass of these tiny bits of matter has remained constant over the last 6 billion years, recent astronomical observations indicate.

Believe it or not, but whether an electron was lighter or heftier in the past is a question of fundamental importance. Variations in particle masses and other so-called constants of nature, such as the speed of light, may help explain the mystery of dark energy and determine if hidden dimensions exist.

“Some theorists claim the physical constants should have varied over time,” said Christian Henkel of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany. “This is something that is part of the modeling of the universe.”

Henkel and his colleagues have placed new limits on wavering constants. By observing the absorption of radio waves by molecules in the early universe, the researchers have shown that the mass ratio between two particles — the proton and the electron — has not changed from its present value by more than 2 parts in a million.

The results, reported in a recent issue of the journal Science, call into question previous measurements that claim to have seen variations in this mass ratio. - continued on space.com

Project Ploughshare

click to enlarge

Here is a blast from the past. At one time, a-bombs were going to be used to dig canals. It is rumored that some huge caves were created with a-bombs in Nevada which, after the radiation subsided, became underground bases.

… If nuclear explosives are placed in “strings” with the distance between them equal to half the diameter of the crater that a single shot would dig, and if they are exploded simultaneously, they will excavate a smooth-bottomed ditch, throwing the rock to the sides. One hundred shots, for instance, of 100 kilotons each, will dig a ditch 1,600 ft. wide, 350 ft. deep and 16 miles long. If its bottom is 60-odd ft. below sea level, it can serve as a spacious ship canal.Clean Clouds. When a crater-making shot is fired, a mushroom of earth grows out of the ground above the explosion. A jet of hot gas raises a dust cloud high in the air. Most of the dust and debris settle immediately, and hardly any dust falls more than 21 miles from the crater. This dust is not very radioactive. Nearly all of the shot’s radioactivity is buried deep under the rubble that falls back into the hole. Ploughshare men are sure that if modern, “clean” explosives are used, the radioactivity that escapes will be of little significance. - time

Nitinol wire demonstration

We may be only 60 years behind the aliens that crashed at Roswell, NM in designing amazing indestructible(?) memory metal.

The way I read it, the “restore to original shape” temperature can be changed so you could make Nitinol which returns to its original shape at room temperature.

What would a car or aircraft body of this material be like? Could Nitinol act as a light weight protective armor that would heal itself if deformed by a crash or even a bullet? Perhaps not, otherwise, why would it have not been done already?

Physicists Create Millimeter-sized ‘Bohr Atom’

Nearly a century after Danish physicist Niels Bohr offered his planet-like model of the hydrogen atom, a Rice University-led team of physicists has created giant, millimeter-sized atoms that resemble it more closely than any other experimental realization yet achieved. … But his notion of electrons traveling in discrete orbits was eventually displaced by quantum mechanics, which revealed that electrons don’t have precise positions but are instead distributed in wave-like patterns.

“In a sufficiently large system, the quantum effects at the atomic scale can transition into the classical mechanics found in Bohr’s model,” said lead researcher Barry Dunning, Rice’s Sam and Helen Worden Professor of Physics and Astronomy. “Using highly excited Rydberg atoms and a series of pulsed electric fields, we were able to manipulate the electron motion and create circular, planet-like states.”

The team included members from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Vienna University of Technology. Using lasers, the researchers excited potassium atoms to extremely high levels. Using a carefully tailored series of short electric pulses, the team was then able to coax the atoms into a precise configuration with one point-like, “localized” electron orbiting far from the nucleus. In fact, the atoms are true atomic giants, with diameters approaching one millimeter.

“Our measurements show that the electrons remain localized for several orbits and behave much as classical particles,” Dunning said.

He said the work has potential applications in next-generation computers and in the study of classical and quantum chaos. - more on sdaily