Turning Light Into Matter … And Raspberries

from KHouse

Mass = L/c². Albert Einstein said so in 1905. A simple replacement of L (light energy) with the letter E (all energy), move “c²” to the other side of the equal sign, and we get “Ta da!” the familiar equation: mc²=E

Or, better yet: E = mc²

Thanks to Gary Larson, Bugs Bunny and elementary school, most people are aware of this bit of physics, and even that Einstein is to be blamed for it.

What does it mean? It means that Mass is ultimately equal to Energy, which was demonstrated in the detonation of the first nuclear bomb. It also theoretically means that Energy can be converted into Mass, but until recently physicists hadn’t been able to figure out how to it. We’re not only years away from a good old-fashioned Star Trek food synthesizer, we can’t even make protons from photons.

In 1934, Gregory Breit and John Wheeler played with the idea that matter could indeed be created from light by smashing together two photons. They might not be able to organize molecules into apples or pears, but the photon car-wreck could create an electron and a positron. It has been 82 years, and physicists at the Imperial College of London have finally put together plans for a “photo-photon collider” — a machine that could actually force two photons to crash into one another. Sort of.

It’s not as easy as you’d think. Photons belong to a class of subatomic particles known as bosons, and bosons are known for their peculiar ability to share the same quantum state. It’s like being able to be in the same place at the same time. In reality, Star Wars light sabers wouldn’t smash into each other, they’d “swish” pass right through one another like good light beams should. Fermions, particles like protons and electrons, aren’t so fortunate. They take up their own space and they don’t like to share it. It’s easy to smash together two particles that take up their own space. It’s not so easy to crash together two particles that can pass right through each other… like a light wave.

Photons do interact with charged particles like electrons and protons, though. Occasionally, a photon can waffle into a particle-antiparticle pair like an electron and positron, allowing one of the mates in this subatomic pair to capture another photon. A soon as the electron and positron recombine (Pow!), they release two photons. This all happens in fractions of a second, and it appears as though two photons just bounced off each other. This “photon-photon scattering” has been observed in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, but nobody’s been able to systematically force the interaction.

A research team led by Oliver Pike at the Imperial College of London has figured out a way to increase the number of photon-derived electron-positron teams that can interact with other particles. Their article in Nature Photonics proposes the building of a machine called the “photon-photon collider” which uses several steps, starting with accelerating electrons with a laser and pounding them into a bar of gold. This first step will create a beam of light immensely more intense than sunlight. The machine would aim this beam at a hohlraum, a hollow cave of gold, to create a thermal radiation field that releases another beam of light that will intersect with the first beam. The electrons and positrons formed during the interaction of the light beams would be detected as they left the hohlraum, and should produce far more pairs of particles than the occasional chance encounter made in the CERN LHC.

The design is out; now the researchers have to build the machine and test it.

“Although the theory is conceptually simple, it has been very difficult to verify experimentally,” Pike said. “We were able to develop the idea for the collider very quickly, but the experimental design we propose can be carried out with relative ease and with existing technology… The race to carry out and complete the experiment is on!”

It’s a massive challenge for physicists, but once they conquer it, their accomplishment will still come several years too late. Organic machines have long been capable of taking light energy and converting it into matter. In fact, these organic machine are capable of organizing molecules into the shapes of apples and pears and figs. These organic machines are called “trees” and they are in many respects similar to the organic machines called “raspberry bushes” that provide delicious materials for jams and ice cream topping.

You’d think that we could throw light, carbon and water together into some sort of food-like substance too, but there will be no vending machines producing foods that were “photo-synthesized” any time soon. As great as our technological advances have proved, manipulating subatomic particles is still the expertise of the Creator alone.

• “Scientists design a collider that turns light into matter”
— CNET

• “Einstein Was Right: You Can Turn Energy Into Matter”
— Forbes

• “Does The Inertia Of A Body Depend Upon Its Energy-Content?” By A. Einstein
— FourmiLab

• “Observing Light-by-Light Scattering at the Large Hadron Collider”
— Physics Review

Alternatives To Elusive Dark Matter

from KHouse Newsletter January 2014

The Universe is made up primarily of a mysterious substance called dark matter, a mesh, a spider web of space. That’s what popular science says, at least. Astrophysicists insist that dark matter is there; the indirect evidence is substantial. Yet, after multiple millions of dollars have been spent on trying to track down the actual physical particles that make up dark matter, science continues to come up empty. Maybe the astrophysicists need to try another approach in order to finally detect the elusive substance, or maybe they just need to adjust their current models about the nature of light, time, and the Universe itself.

It all started with the spinning of distant galaxies. A Swiss astrophysicist named Fritz Zwicky postulated in the 1930s that invisible stuff he called “dunkle Materie” hid inside the galaxies he was studying, because they spun too fast to contain only the visible stars and gas he could account for. Scientists observe the same puzzling phenomenon today. Based on spectral line data, it appears that the outer rims of spiral galaxies are moving at the same rate as the insides of the galaxies – and that doesn’t make any sense. The galaxies should fly apart from spinning that fast.

This problem caused Zwicky to hypothesize the existence of dunkle Materie—large amounts of invisible material that provides the gravitational pull to hold the galaxies together. It’s what physicists think dark matter is – neutral, uncharged particles that interact with visible material by massive gravitational force.

There is also the matter of gravitational lensing. Starlight through space if often seen to bend and warp around unseen massive objects. The Hubble space telescope can often produce two or three images of the same galaxy in one single picture. The individual images may be different sizes but contain the same features, as though space were a hall of mirrors. As beams of light from the same galaxy bend around objects in space, they reach the earth from slightly different angles, giving the appearance of coming from different locations. Clumps of invisible dark matter between us and these galaxies are blamed for causing the distortions.

Cosmologists have a variety of reasons for embracing the idea of dark matter. The problem is that its existence is inferred from physicists’ current interpretations of data; nobody has been able to directly detect the stuff yet. The physicists are confident that dark matter comes in the form of a particle, a weakly interactive massive particle (WIMP) that creates gravitational effects but otherwise ignores normal visible particles. The trick is to get it to get some WIMPs to show themselves by hitting visible matter into them and making them say, “Ow!”

Rick Gaitskell of Brown University has been hunting for dark matter for 24 odd years and heads the team that turned on the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment in South Dakota. A mile underground in the Homestake Gold Mine, the LUX particle accelerator shoots xenon particles past ultra-sensitive detectors. If the xenon particles smack into one of these WIMPs, it should give off a little flash of electricity that the detectors can catch and record.

So far, though, the LUX hasn’t found anything. Gaitskell told Popular Science this past autumn, “Every experiment has reported essentially negative results. No one even knows for sure if the d- stuff really exists.” If dark matter really does make up five-sixths of the matter in the Universe, it certainly does an excellent job of hiding itself.

A Dark Herring

Of course, dark matter may not exist after all. In his own PowerPoint slides on dark matter posted on the Brown University website, Gaitskell tells his students, “It has been a Problem in Cosmology that astrophysical assumptions often need to be made to interpret data/extra parameters.” It’s true. Scientists create models they use to interpret the information that space gives them. The models are based on certain assumptions, and if those assumptions are incorrect, the data gets interpreted wrongly.

Possible Alternatives

If dark matter is just an illusion, though, what is causing the observed phenomena? What does hold spinning spiral galaxies together and cause the bending of light through allegedly empty space?

First of all, it is odd that so many spiral galaxies appear to have the same issue – the matter across their diameters all appear to be rotating at the same rate – all without flying apart. It may be that that the light information coming from them is interpreted incorrectly. The redshifts that are treated as a sort of Doppler effect – light appearing to lengthen as its source moves away from us – may have another explanation.

In the 1970s, William Tifft at the University of Arizona noted that his redshift measurements didn’t show gradual, smooth shifting to the red. Instead, they were quantized – the measurements made small jumps as though going up a flight of stairs. Two astronomers from Scotland, Guthrie and Napier, tried to disprove Tiffts quantized redshift ideas in the 1990s, but they finally confirmed his results.

Professor José Senovilla, Marc Mars and Raül Vera of the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, and University of Salamanca, Spain proposed in 2011 that the redshift isn’t caused by a Doppler shift but by the slowing of Time itself. Dark energy supposedly permeates the Universe, causing the outer edges of space to expand at an accelerating rate. That’s the wrong way to interpret the light wave data, suggest these scientists. Senovilla and Vera argue that the better explanation is the opposite, that Time has been slowing down and we see its effect in the apparent stretching of light waves. The light reaching the Hubble telescope from distant galaxies might not tell us as much about the rate the galaxies are spinning as about the nature of Time itself.

The speed of light itself may be slowing. Physicists insist that light speed is a constant, but they may have made that determination prematurely. The speed of light may not be dropping very quickly, but a variety of papers have been written in the past several decades that suggest light speed is not a constant after all. Paul Davies, currently of Arizona State, argued in 2002 that the speed of light may be slowing down, and physicist Barry Setterfield has written extensively on the subject.

Yves-Henri Sanejouand from the University of Nantes in France in 2010 showed a possible slowing of the speed of light by about 0.02–0.03 m/s per year. That’s not much, but it demonstrates the real possibility of a much faster speed of light in the past. “The constancy of the speed of light is one of the fundamental pillars of contemporary physics,” explains Sanejouand, “so the possibility that it may instead vary (even at a slow rate) has far reaching consequences (although mostly on the theoretical side).”

It may also be that spiral galaxies haven’t had time to fly apart. If the speed of light has been slowing, methods for dating the age of the Universe might be way off. The age of the Universe itself may have been overestimated.

While dark matter is credited with causing gravitational lensing, Anirudh Pradhan of Hindu P. G. College in India suggests that the observed bending of light might be caused by the refraction of light as it hits the gasses around various astronomical bodies. We see the refraction of light all the time in everyday life. The fisherman who goes to stab a fish in the water cannot aim directly at the image of the fish, because the light changes direction as it leaves the denser water and hits the less dense air. The refraction of light makes the fish look like it’s in a spot that it isn’t. The same thing can happen in space. As light shoots through the vacuum of space, it hits clouds of gasses that cause it to change direction so that when it reaches us, multiple images of various sizes are produced – and we can’t be certain of where they actually originated.

The nature of the Universe is an involved mystery, a deep subject that requires a great deal more study. Yet, the hunt for dark matter highlights the importance of examining one’s assumptions in the pursuit of scientific truth. Assumptions are required to interpret data, but a great deal of time and money can be spent to prove incorrect interpretations when the underlying assumptions are faulty.

Further Reading

• Dark Matter Search Leaves Scientists Questioning Basic Theories
— Scientific American

• Dark Matter Still Hiding: Latest Experimental Sweep Comes Up Empty
— Scientific American

• Evidence For Dark Matter
— Brown.edu

• Refraction-Based Alternative Explanation for:Bending of Light Near a Star, Gravitational Red/Blue Shift, Gravitational Lensing and Black-Hole
— UPM.edu.my

• What is Gravitational Lensing?
— CFHT LenS

• Einstein’s Relativity Theory Hits A Speed Bump
— The Age

• Is Light Slowing Down?
— Optics and Photonics Focus

• Dark Energy Is A Fiction: The Appearance of Acceleration Is Caused By Time Itself Slowing Down
— Daily Galaxy

• Too Much Dark Matter in Galaxy Cluster? ‘Dark Core’ May Not Be So Dark After All
— Science Daily

The Mystery Rock on Mars

from  KHouse January 2013

A mysterious rock said to resemble a “jelly donut” suddenly appeared, apparently out of nowhere, in front of the Opportunity Mars rover. It is “like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” according to NASA scientists.

Experts said they were “completely confused” by both the origins and makeup of the object. (The rock is currently being analyzed by the remote diagnostic equipment onboard Opportunity.)

Astronomers noticed the new rock after it had “appeared” without any explanation on an outcropping which had previously been empty just days before. By sheer coincidence, the rover has been stationary for about a month due to bad weather and NASA scientists have been looking at the area in detail since it has nowhere else to go. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California is actually doing the analysis of the Martian surface.

NASA issued a Mars status report entitled “encountering a surprise,” and the head scientist for the Opportunity mission, Steve Squyres, was quoted as saying that Mars “keeps throwing new things at us.”

Squyres said that two pictures taken on the Martian surface just 12 Martian days apart first showed an empty landscape, then “We saw this rock just sitting here. It looks white around the edge in the middle and there’s a low spot in the center that’s dark red—it looks like a jelly doughnut.

“And it appeared, just plain appeared at that spot—and we haven’t ever driven over that spot.”

Squyres said his team had two theories on how the rock got there—that there’s “a smoking hole in the ground somewhere nearby” and it was caused by a meteor or that it was “somehow flicked out of the ground by a wheel” as the rover went by.

“We had driven a meter or two away from here, and I think the idea that somehow we mysteriously flicked it with a wheel is the best explanation,” Squyres said.

However, the riddle wrapped in a puzzle gets even stranger once the rover took a deeper look into the rock. Squyres explained: “We are as we speak situated with the rover’s instruments deployed making measurements of this rock.

“We’ve taken pictures of both the doughnut and jelly parts, and then got the first data on the composition of the jelly yesterday.

“It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” he said. “It’s very high in sulphur, it’s very high in magnesium and it’s got twice as much manganese as we’ve ever seen in anything on Mars.

“I don’t know what any of this means. We’re completely confused, and everyone in the team is arguing and fighting (over what it means).

“That’s the beauty of this mission… what I’ve realized is that we will never be finished. There will always be something tantalizing, something wonderful just beyond our reach that we didn’t quite get to—and that’s the nature of exploration.”

While Spirit lost contact with Earth and was later declared “dead” in 2010, Opportunity has now roamed the planet far in excess of what was originally planned as a three-month mission. NASA said that with its maximum speed of just 0.05mph, as of “Sol 3547” (15 January 2014) Opportunity had covered just over 24 miles (38km).

For Further Reading

• Bertha, M. (2014, January 20). NASA scientists are arguing about a ‘jelly donut’ rock they found on Mars.
Retrieved from Philly.com: http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/trending/NASA-scientists-are-arguing-about-a-weird-rock-they-found-on-Mars.html

• CNN. (2014, January 21). Rock Mysteriously Appears in Front of the Mars Opportunity Rover.
Retrieved from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkDBIkYoVJw

• Landau, E. (2014, January 21). Mystery rock spotted on Mars.
Retrieved from CNN.com: http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/20/tech/innovation/mars-mystery-rock/

Quantum Theory: is the Universe not gravitationally but electrical?

from K-House

Ever since the birth of Quantum Theory there has been speculation—some privately held, some very public—of what the implications of the existence of quanta really means. As measuring devices improved dramatically, they provided more clarity to the issue. Today it is an accepted “truth” that everything is quantized. Energy (as well as length, time, and mass) exists in discrete quantities, divisions if you will.

There are also other side-effects to this discovery. Everything is “connected.” All particles on the quantum level know what the other particles are doing, regardless of distance, instantaneously. Let that sink in. Also, there is a size at which, when dividing the particle in half, it becomes “non-local.” It is nowhere and everywhere. Every measurement of the universe in which we reside has a “quantum limitation.”

Since what we know of reality is based solely on our perception (what we see, hear, feel, taste and smell), it appears there is a foundational structure upon which all of the details “hang.”

If we entertain the idea that the Universe is not gravitationally based but is electrical, it certainly would fit even our most common understanding of a computer-generated simulation. Because of the many difficulties with the gravitational model of the universe, many physicists are being convinced of an electrical model. Many of the issues concerning missing mass, celestial interactions, black holes and the abnormality of temperatures on our own Sun dissolve with the electrical theory.

There is a movie from a few years back (The Thirteenth Floor) in which the simulated characters of a simulated world are confronted with the fundamental limitations of their “reality.” Because of the limitations of structure, they were forced to conclude they were living within a “program” created by an outside source.

Ironically, this is where the physicists of our time find themselves. Disregarding what the Bible has said all along, of course, they are seeking to quantify and confirm the obvious, yet unwanted, conclusion to where the evidence is leading them. Like all good “scientists” they are trying to creatively foster any explanation other than a Creator that loves them and has been trying to inform them in every way possible.

The more they learn about the foundations of our reality, the more the idea of an underlying structure to space/time is confirmed. Millions of dollars are being spent in preparation for the design and construction of experiments to “test” the simulation theory.

Right now at the University of Bonn, nuclear physicist Silas Beane and some of his colleagues have come up with a test that exploits this feature of simulations; their need to be discretized, or quantized.

Beane and company believe we can test to see if the universe behaves the way we expect from theory, or the way we’d expect in a discretized model like a computer simulation. If the latter is true, it would provide evidence that we are all stuck in a simulation:

“In our universe, the laws of physics are the same in every direction. But in a grid, this changes since you no longer have a space-time continuum, and the laws of physics would depend on direction. Simulators would be able to hide this effect but they wouldn’t be able to get rid of it completely.”

Beane and company are testing by creating their own simulations. They are presently simulating quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which is the fundamental force in nature that produces the strong nuclear force among protons and neutrons, and to nuclei and their interactions. In place of the space-time continuum, they have designed tiny, tightly spaced cubic “lattices.” They call this “lattice gauge theory.” After observing their models, they then compare them to real world observations.

Interestingly, the researchers consider their simulation to be just a beginning. As computational development takes place, they envision more powerful versions in which molecules, cells, and even humans themselves might someday be simulated. But for now, they’re interested in creating accurate models of cosmological processes — and finding out which ones might show evidence of an underlying lattice.

On the possibility that we do live in a simulation he says, “There is a famous argument that we probably do live in a simulation. The idea is that in the future, humans will be able to simulate entire universes quite easily (approximately 500 years). And given the vastness of time ahead, the number of these simulations is likely to be huge. So if you ask the question: ‘Do we live in the one true reality or in one of the many simulations?’ the answer, statistically speaking, is that we’re more likely to be living in a simulation.”

The interesting analysis that drives them is that we have “noticed” that our reality has limitations. It is not a foregone conclusion that if some alien culture is behind this simulation, it would be constructed in a way we could understand it. Since we can, at least so far, understand its limitations, this means one of two things; either the designer is like us or it is constructed for our discovery. Either scenario causes secular scientists headaches. How could “they” be like us when they are capable of such technologies? And why would they care that we can discover limitations that should be invisible to the participant?

Many are seeing this edge of reality as an obstacle to be overcome. They talk of entering into the “real world” by their own intellect and effort. This is vaguely reminiscent of the Tower of Babel. As man stumbles forward, the higher probability is of misstep. If God acted at Babel to halt their development capabilities, what more could He have in store for us now?

Related Links:

  •   Physicists Devise Test To See If We’re Living In ‘The Matrix’ - The Verge

  •   Physicists Say There May Be a Way to Prove That We Live in a Computer Simulation - io9

  •   Physicists May Have Evidence Universe Is A Computer Simulation - Huffington Post