Some basic concepts of physics

At Euan Mearns.com, Geo writes about Entropy, Energy, and Order in the Universe. Here are some questions he answers.

What is entropy?

What is order?

Why is atomic energy so much more powerful than all other forms of energy?

Why is geothermal lumped with fission and fusion?

What does it take to turn antimatter into energy?

Read more here.

"Something, we know not what."

At the American Thinker Matt Patterson asks, "What lies beneathe?"

New scientific discoveries in astrophysics and archeology make the notion of “settled science” risible. They also bring to mind the wisdom of Donald Rumsfeld in stressing the vital importance of “unknown unknowns.”

Perhaps the Western penetration of nature has been superficial at best. In fact, the foremost thinkers on the very edges of science are staring into an abyss of knowledge -- literally.

Dark matter and dark energy combined make up 95 percent of everything. And yet we have no idea what these things are, how they work, or what they mean for the fate of the universe.

Put it this way: all of the stars and star-spawned material that is visible in the universe -- including every planet, person or proton -- accounts for a mere 5 percent of existence. It reflects radiation or emits it. It shines gloriously in the night sky, begging for our gaze and our awe. The rest? We know it’s there, but we cannot see it.

It is literally dark.

Dark matter is composed of some thing other than the electrons and protons that make up our 5 percent world. Whatever it is, we can be thankful for it -- it seems to be the only thing holding galaxies together (there is not enough ordinary matter present in observable galaxies to prevent them from disintegrating).

Dark energy is a mysterious force borne by some thing other than the photons that carry energy in our 5 percent world. We know it exists because we observe its effect on our luminous matter -- the universe is flying apart. Gravity should be slowing the universe down and contracting its constituent parts; instead, things are flying apart at an increasing rate.

Scientists are hard at work of course, trying to detect and understand these phenomena. And they may one day succeed. But their failure to understand the depth of their ignorance until very recently speaks to a problem with the scientific method itself.

The long climb to scientific supremacy begun by Aristotle in his invention of symbolic logic has in the end taken us to the summit of what turns out to be a very small hill, as we crane our necks upward at a looming, unseeable, unending mountain range.

...If the dark nature of our universe is only now being acknowledged and probed by the scientific community, it will be many years yet before the realization seeps into the worlds of art and philosophy. But when it does, the minds and creations of our dreamers and thinkers will reverberate with a profound sense of insecurity that may shake the very foundations of modern existence.

How is it possible, they will ask, that so much of reality remains closed to us even after two thousand years of following the Theseus-like string left by our great scientists? It’s as if we emerge from the labyrinth, having followed the string -- not into the bright light of day -- but into a deeper and blacker chamber.

It is, ironically, parallel to what is happening in the realm of archaeology. The textbooks of our high schools and universities lay out facts about our past as if they are clean and neat ornaments to be passed around and cooed over. The reality is that the more we dig, the more it becomes obvious that what we thought we knew about our ancestors is at best incomplete, and at worst dangerously wrong.

For example: the standard model of the rise of civilization draws a very straight and neat line from the Neolithic revolution, which led to the invention of cities, the written word, etc., right up to the iPhone that’s burning a hole in your pocket.

Unfortunately, it isn't so simple.

Recent excavations at a site in southeast Turkey show an astonishing megalithic monument, covered with complex and beautiful symbols. It is called Göbekli Tepe.

...We have no idea how large it really is, who built it, what they used it for, or why. We know it was in use for thousands of years. And it was apparently, intentionally buried around 8,000 B.C. The deliberate burial of such a complex, requiring the movement of hundreds of tons of earth is in itself as stunning an engineering achievement as the construction of the monument itself.

Keep in mind this site is not some fevered imagining of some History Channel fake expert or alien conspiracy theorist. This is an actual archaeological site being excavated and puzzled over by credentialed and thoroughly disturbed scientists.

And in fact, excavators estimate that what they have found constitutes a mere 5 percent of the complex, and that digging for another century will still not reveal the whole of the structure.

It’s all so disturbing to scientists because they thought they knew the human story already. And they make their living telling that story, their entire lives are based upon the fact that they are experts in that story. How profoundly unsettling it must be to realize perhaps you understand the smallest sliver of a story that was more vast and complicated than you could have ever imagined.

And so it is with physicists confronting dark matter and energy.

In the end, Western scientists may be forced, when asked to explain what the vast majority of existence rests upon, to answer:

“Something, we know not what.”

Read more here.

He tells about

Understanding the world

Digitally generated image showing volcanic eruptions during formation of Earth Dorling Kindersley—Getty Images/Vetta

Amir D. Aczel writes,

Why is our Universe so precisely tailor-made for the emergence of life? This question has never been answered satisfactorily, and I believe that it will never find a scientific solution. For the deeper we delve into the mysteries of physics and cosmology, the more the Universe appears to be intricate and incredibly complex. To explain the quantum-mechanical behavior of even one tiny particle requires pages and pages of extremely advanced mathematics. Why are even the tiniest particles of matter so unbelievably complicated? It appears that there is a vast, hidden “wisdom,” or structure, or a knotty blueprint for even the most simple-looking element of nature. And the situation becomes much more daunting as we expand our view to the entire cosmos.

We know that 13.7 billion years ago, a gargantuan burst of energy, whose nature and source are completely unknown to us and not in the least understood by science, initiated the creation of our Universe. Then suddenly, as if by magic, the “God particle”—the Higgs boson discovered two years ago inside CERN’s powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider—came into being and miraculously gave the Universe its mass. Why did this happen? The mass constituted elementary particles—the quarks and the electron—whose weights and electrical charges had to fall within immeasurably tight bounds for what would happen next. For from within the primeval “soup” of elementary particles that constituted the young Universe, again as if by a magic hand, all the quarks suddenly bunched in threes to form protons and neutrons, their electrical charges set precisely to the exacting level needed to attract and capture the electrons, which then began to circle nuclei made of the protons and neutrons. All of the masses, the charges, and the forces of interaction in the Universe had to be just in the precisely needed amounts so that early light atoms could form. Larger ones would then be cooked in nuclear fires inside stars, thus giving us the carbon, iron, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the other elements that are so essential for life to emerge. And eventually, the highly complicated double-helix molecule, the life-propagating DNA, would be formed.

Why did everything we need in order to exist come into being? How was all of this possible without some latent outside power to orchestrate the precise dance of elementary particles required for the creation of all the essentials of life? The great British mathematician Roger Penrose has calculated—based on only one of the hundreds of parameters of the physical Universe—that the probability of the emergence of a life-giving cosmos was one divided by 10, raised to the power 10, and again raised to the power of 123. This is a number as close to zero as anyone has ever imagined. (The probability is much, much smaller than that of winning the Mega Millions jackpot for more days than the Universe has been in existence.)

The “Scientific Atheists” have scrambled to explain this troubling mystery by suggesting the existence of a multiverse—an infinite set of universes, each with its own parameters. In some universes, the conditions are wrong for life; however, by the sheer size of this putative multiverse, there must be a universe where everything is right. But if it takes an immense power of nature to create one universe, then how much more powerful would that force have to be in order to create infinitely many universes? So the purely hypothetical multiverse does not solve the problem of God. The incredible fine-tuning of the Universe presents the most powerful argument for the existence of an immanent creative entity we may well call God. Lacking convincing scientific evidence to the contrary, such a power may be necessary to force all the parameters we need for our existence—cosmological, physical, chemical, biological, and cognitive—to be what they are.

Science and religion are two sides of the same deep human impulse to understand the world, to know our place in it, and to marvel at the wonder of life and the infinite cosmos we are surrounded by. Let’s keep them that way, and not let one of them attempt to usurp the role of the other.

Read more here.

Astronomers report seeing the beginning of the Big Bang

So what is this news? Dennis Overbye writes in the New York Times about space ripples. The man in the photo below is Alan Guth.


Overbye writes,

One night late in 1979, an itinerant young physicist named Alan Guth, with a new son and a year’s appointment at Stanford, stayed up late with his notebook and equations, venturing far beyond the world of known physics.

He was trying to understand why there was no trace of some exotic particles that should have been created in the Big Bang. Instead he discovered what might have made the universe bang to begin with. A potential hitch in the presumed course of cosmic evolution could have infused space itself with a special energy that exerted a repulsive force, causing the universe to swell faster than the speed of light for a prodigiously violent instant.

If true, the rapid engorgement would solve paradoxes like why the heavens look uniform from pole to pole and not like a jagged, warped mess. The enormous ballooning would iron out all the wrinkles and irregularities. Those particles were not missing, but would be diluted beyond detection, like spit in the ocean.

Overbye continues,

On Monday, Dr. Guth’s starship came in. Radio astronomers reported that they had seen the beginning of the Big Bang, and that his hypothesis, known undramatically as inflation, looked right.

Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. They are the long-sought smoking-gun evidence of inflation, proof, Dr. Kovac and his colleagues say, that Dr. Guth was correct.

Confirming inflation would mean that the universe we see, extending 14 billion light-years in space with its hundreds of billions of galaxies, is only an infinitesimal patch in a larger cosmos whose extent, architecture and fate are unknowable. Moreover, beyond our own universe there might be an endless number of other universes bubbling into frothy eternity, like a pot of pasta water boiling over.

Physicists recognize four forces at work in the world today: gravity, electromagnetism, and strong and weak nuclear forces. But they have long suspected that those are simply different manifestations of a single unified force that ruled the universe in its earliest, hottest moments.

As the universe cooled, according to this theory, there was a fall from grace, like some old folk mythology of gods or brothers falling out with each other. The laws of physics evolved, with one force after another splitting away.

thanks to Conor Friedersdorf for linking to this article.

Here is the press conference announcing the findings