Sick
Many apologies, folks, for the lack of updates. Unfortunately I was severely waylaid by the little guy in the picture above. He packs quite a punch. But I'm now on the mend and looking forward to a couple of shows in Los Angeles this coming weekend!
Saturday April 14th 7:00pm - The Cinema Bar, Culver City, LA
Sunday April 15th 3:00pm - Coffee Gallery Backstage, LA (With Rod Melancon)
They're both gonna be great shows so come check it out!
Gratitude
Time
π
Series
Neutrinos
The neutrinos in question undertook a journey from CERN in Geneva, through the Earth, and finally ended up at the Gran Sasso laboratory deep underneath the mountain of the same name in Italy. The neutrinos were produced by the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN, along with a lot of other sub-atomic particles. The trick particle physicists use to get a beam of only neutrinos, and the reason the detector for the experiment is located so far away from the source of the beam, is to send the beam of particles off to travel underground for several miles. Neutrinos are the only particles that survive the journey, because they pass through matter completely unscathed whereas the others do not. The now pure neutrino beam takes less than 3 milliseconds to travel the 730km between CERN and Gran Sasso, and the neutrinos are detected by apparatus belonging to the OPERA experiment, consisting of around 150,000 bricks of photographic film interleaved with lead plates.
The neutrinos, says the paper released by the OPERA experiment after the news was first broken, reached the detector 60 nanoseconds before they would have done had they been travelling at the speed of light. The result amounts to a statistical significance of 6-sigma. “Sigma” is shorthand for standard deviation, a statistical tool that can be used to give an estimate of the certainty of a result. Generally, the higher the number of sigma, the more trustworthy the result. A minimum of 5-sigma, equivalent to a one in 1,744,278 chance that the result is a fluke, is normally required to claim a discovery. 6-sigma, equivalent to a one in 506,797,346 chance is even more convincing.
- Extract from the article "Faster-than-light neutrinos show science in action", by Kelly Oakes and published in Scientific American Magazine, published online on September 23rd, 2011. Read the whole thing here.
If it turns out to be true, this is a pretty big deal for science.
Nothing
Since time immemorial, curious people have asked where the universe came from. Nowadays we have a secular answer: the Big Bang. And yet that answer, incredible as it may be, is only partially satisfying. After all, we can still ask where the Big Bang came from; and we can still wonder, sensibly enough, how something (the universe) could come from nothing (whatever came before it). In his new book, On Being, Peter Atkins, a British chemist and science writer, offers an intriguing answer to those questions. To understand how something can come out of nothing, he writes, you have to appreciate the fact that "there probably isn't anything here anyway" -- that "at a deep level there is nothing" in the universe, really. "The substrate of existence," he argues, "is nothing at all."
Consider electrical charge. In our universe, there are positively and negatively charged particles. How did all that charge come into being out of nothingness? It didn't, Atkins writes, since "the total charge is zero." The Big Bang merely separated out a uniform state of chargelessness into many individual instances of charge, positive and negative. The same goes for matter and energy generally: the total amount of matter and energy in the universe seems to be balanced out by huge amounts of "dark matter" and "dark energy," which express themselves in terms of gravitational attraction. The Big Bang didn't create all that energy, as such. Instead, it seems to have turned an initial Nothingness into a "much more interesting and potent" Nothingness -- a "Nothing that has been separated into opposites to give, thereby, the appearance of something."
How much, if anything, does that explain? "The separation of Nothing into opposites still needs explanation," Atkins concedes. Still, he writes, "it seems to me that such a process, though fearsomelessly difficult to explain, is less overwhelmingly fearsome than the process of positive, specific, munificent creation." The main point is that the Big Bang doesn't mark, necessarily, the creation of something out of nothing. If that happened at all -- and it may be, Atkins points out, that there was has never been absolutely Nothing, in a total sense -- then it probably happened further back in the pre-cosmological past. Instead, it marks the emergence of texture, differentiation, and particularity out of even, unchanging featurelessness. It's not something out of nothing, but interestingness out of boredom.
- From the article "The Big Nothing", by Josh Rothman, posted in The Boston Globe, June 27th, 2011.
via boston.com
Nothing
Since time immemorial, curious people have asked where the universe came from. Nowadays we have a secular answer: the Big Bang. And yet that answer, incredible as it may be, is only partially satisfying. After all, we can still ask where the Big Bang came from; and we can still wonder, sensibly enough, how something (the universe) could come from nothing (whatever came before it). In his new book, On Being, Peter Atkins, a British chemist and science writer, offers an intriguing answer to those questions. To understand how something can come out of nothing, he writes, you have to appreciate the fact that "there probably isn't anything here anyway" -- that "at a deep level there is nothing" in the universe, really. "The substrate of existence," he argues, "is nothing at all."
Consider electrical charge. In our universe, there are positively and negatively charged particles. How did all that charge come into being out of nothingness? It didn't, Atkins writes, since "the total charge is zero." The Big Bang merely separated out a uniform state of chargelessness into many individual instances of charge, positive and negative. The same goes for matter and energy generally: the total amount of matter and energy in the universe seems to be balanced out by huge amounts of "dark matter" and "dark energy," which express themselves in terms of gravitational attraction. The Big Bang didn't create all that energy, as such. Instead, it seems to have turned an initial Nothingness into a "much more interesting and potent" Nothingness -- a "Nothing that has been separated into opposites to give, thereby, the appearance of something."
How much, if anything, does that explain? "The separation of Nothing into opposites still needs explanation," Atkins concedes. Still, he writes, "it seems to me that such a process, though fearsomelessly difficult to explain, is less overwhelmingly fearsome than the process of positive, specific, munificent creation." The main point is that the Big Bang doesn't mark, necessarily, the creation of something out of nothing. If that happened at all -- and it may be, Atkins points out, that there was has never been absolutely Nothing, in a total sense -- then it probably happened further back in the pre-cosmological past. Instead, it marks the emergence of texture, differentiation, and particularity out of even, unchanging featurelessness. It's not something out of nothing, but interestingness out of boredom.
- From the article "The Big Nothing", by Josh Rothman, posted in The Boston Globe, June 27th, 2011.
via boston.com