Category: Science

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SETIcon II, June 22 -24, 2012 in Santa Clara, California

SETIcon (June 22 -24, 2012) is organized by the SETI Institute and it is a public event where science and imagination meet.

I wish I could attend SETIcon II but unfortunately and as you probably know, I’m not on Earth right now and I still don’t know yet how to teleport or travel through time…

But since you obviously are on Earth, maybe some of you living near Santa Clara, California, will attend the great event.

SETIcon brings together innovative scientists, science fiction authors, space and science artists, space lovers, and the curious and adventurous everywhere for a 3-day public celebration and exploration of space, real science, technology, imagination, and science education.

There is no other event in the world like SETIcon that explores space and the human imagination through the lens of real science, attracting global interest and participation. This is not a science conference with technical lectures (SETI Institute scientists lecture all over the world).

Instead we’ll bring together scientists with authors and artists to celebrate science and exchange ideas around space exploration and our place in the cosmos. SETIcon will create a new channel of discussion between Earthlings where real science and imagination will meet.

Note that SETIcon is also about music: Sheldon Reynolds, a star of the band Earth, Wind and Fire, will perform his hit, “Shining Star,” for Jill Tarter’s Gala on Saturday, June 23rd.

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Neutrinos can’t beat speed of light

It is now official: neutrino researchers admit Albert Einstein was right.

Mark Brown, Wired UK, writes:

Back in September 2011, a team of particle physicists detected neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light as they traveled from CERN to the Gran Sasso lab. They smashed the universal speed limit by 60 nanoseconds — a result that was constant, even after 15,000 repetitions of the process. The results seem to run counter to a century’s worth of physics and would overturn Einsten’s special theory of relativity if true. As such, CERN called for more experiments to double-check the findings.

[…] At the International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto on June 8, CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci presented results on the travel time of neutrinos from CERN to the INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory, on behalf of four experiments — Borexino, Icarus, LVD and Opera. All four experiments measured a neutrino time of flight that was below the speed of light, confirming that neutrinos respect Einstein’s cosmic speed limit. The previous anomaly was “attributed to a faulty element of the experiment’s fibreoptic timing system.”

If you don’t get why it would have been a big deal to prove Einstein’s theory wrong, a news on The Guardian explains it all:

Travelling faster than the speed of light goes against Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity. If it were possible, it would open up the troubling possibility of being able to send information back in time, blurring the line between past and present and wreaking havoc with the fundamental principle of cause and effect.

 Now we know where we stand.

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The 2012 Transit of Venus

I was in orbit around Earth when I witnessed the 2012 transit of Venus. The planet appeared as a small, dark disk gliding across the face of the Sun—a rare event that won’t happen again until the year 2117.

The story of the transit of Venus goes back centuries, as detailed on NASA website:

There is some evidence that the ancient Babylonians saw and recorded on a tablet something about Venus and the Sun in the 16th Century B.C., but the record is not clear. It is fair to say though that Galileo Galilei with his telescope, in 1610, was the first human to actually see Venus as more than just a bright point of light in the sky.

Johannes Kepler, meanwhile, was shaking up the world with his meticulous use of astronomical data assembled by Tycho Brahe. He predicted that Venus would pass in front of the Sun on December 6, 1631, but unfortunately the transit was not visible from Europe at all.

The first recorded sighting of this transit was by British cleric, Jeremiah Horrocks, and his friend William Crabtree, on December 4, 1639—only because Horrocks had mathematically predicted it, using better data than Kepler did.

I told you, it all began long ago…

And now, the best view of the transit of Venus—seen from Hong Kong, China.

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Dark matter finds new home in old gold mine

Lead is a town of about 3,100 residents, about a half-hour from the Wyoming border. Nestled nearly 5,000 feet beneath the earth, is a laboratory that could help scientists answer some pretty heavy questions about life, its origins and the universe.

Yes, we’re talking about dark matter. Regular matter — people and planets, for example — make up about 4 percent of the total mass-energy of the universe, he said. Dark matter makes up about 25 percent.

Dark matter is too sensitive to detect in normal laboratories, but one so far underground would help shield it from pesky cosmic radiation. Also, the LUX detector (Large Underground Xenon, the world’s most sensitive dark-matter detector) is submerged in water, further insulating it.

The article published on the Herald Tribune provides more details about this experience which could lead to unexpected results!

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One day, we will use a neutrinophone, like in Star Trek

This is the kind of news I like. If you thought your new mobile phone was the best ever made, you’re wrong. What about a phone using neutrinos? What about a neutrinophone?

Jeff Nelson is the Cornelia B. Talbot Term Distinguished Associate Professor of Physics at William & Mary and in this article, he explains that the neutrinophone demonstration was a side project stemming from neutrino research at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

About the neutrinos:

Neutrinos are mysterious subatomic particles emitted in unimaginable numbers by nuclear reactions. Despite their high numbers, scientists are just now learning about the characteristics of neutrinos. William & Mary’s physicists are involved in several large multinational collaborations aimed at learning about the properties of neutrinos. In addition to MINERvA and the other Fermilab experiments, William & Mary researchers are involved in other neutrino investigations, most notably the Daya Bay initiative in China.

How it works:

The beam of neutrinos  travels through hundreds of meters of rock on the way to the MINERvA detector, which Nelson explains is designed to study neutrino interactions in detail. For communication over the neutrinophone, the physicists used a simple 1-0 binary code. “If you saw neutrinos, it was a zero; if there weren’t any neutrinos, it was a one,” he explained. “There are standard encoding patterns, ASCII is one of the ones that is used on the computer that tell you what letter corresponds to a series of so many digits of binary bits.”

And the pbest part for the end:

As a practical communications tool, the neutrinophone sits on the border of science and science fiction. Nelson notes that Star Trek characters use neutrino communications, but there are a number of scientific and engineering challenges to creating an interplanetary neutrinophone.

My geek friends and dear Star Trek fans, our dream will, one day, become a reality!

 

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Digital artist creates new kind of experiment at CERN

I read this news last month and I’m eager to know more about what kind of creative work artist Julius von Bismarck, the winner of the Collide@CERN prize, will present on his experiences at the laboratory in September.

From the article published by Symmetry Breaking Magazine:

If attendees at the welcome reception for CERN’s first artist-in-residence learned one thing last night, it was that Julius von Bismarck is not afraid to disrupt others with his art. In a way, this trait puts him right at home with CERN scientists: the kind of people who always question, the kind of people who fill an auditorium to discuss the possibility that a long-held law of physics could be broken. But von Bismarck is not a CERN scientist. So inviting him into the laboratory, where he will stay for the next two months, is a sign of trust – not that he won’t disrupt the scientists, but that, if he does, the experience could be worthwhile […] Von Bismarck, 28, has used invention, experiment and, in many cases, the participation of an unsuspecting crowd to address questions about how we interact with the world around us. In 2006, he created a white, spherical helmet that blocks the wearer’s view of anything but a live video feed from a camera attached to a balloon overhead. “It totally changes your perception,” von Bismarck said. At last night’s reception, he showed a video of himself walking through Berlin’s central train station wearing the contraption. “After a while you get used to it,” he said. “What never goes away is the shakiness. The world is losing stability.”

Art and science, isn’t that exciting?!

Physicist James Wells with Julius Von Bismarck, CERN’s first artist in residence.
Image: CERN