“I find my courage where I can, but I take my weapons from Science.”
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Category Archives: science
Hate E-mails with Richard Dawkins
It is indeed strange how much hatred religion incites in people. And I thought believing in god is all about love and compassion and higher purposes!
hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com
There were protests against the Large Hadron Collider(LHC) because there was rumour-mongering in a section of the media that the LHC will destroy the world. And this website gives you the latest answer to the burning question:
Has The Large Hadron Collider Destroyed The World Yet?
And the answer is, reassuringly:
If you are wondering about the LHC, let me quote from a previous post of mine,
You must have heard about the LHC experiment – the Large Hadron Collider. If not its scientific aspects, at least the doomsday theories surrounding it! LHC is a particle accelerator on the Switzerland-France border, 100m below the earth. The experiment consists of two beams of hadrons(either protons or lead ions) colliding head to head, after gaining high levels of energy, with each successive lap inside the circular accelerator. This is an attempt to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang and will be used by physicists to study the smallest known, fundamental particles, the ‘brick and mortar’ of our Universe, that is expected to be created in the collisions.
Twitpics from space
Twitpics from space: astronaut Astro_Wheels sends pictures to Earth via Twitter
Douglas H. Wheelock is an astronaut on the International Space Station who regularly sends pictures back to Earth via his Twitter account. To see more, check out his Twitter page.
New Reality Transmission
Read the most ridiculous funny thing today! It is a website for an upcoming ‘event’. The event has a sufficiently corny name – New Reality Transmission – and it is this global event that is going to solve all of world’s problems instantaneously! And how? Through meditation! The description of the event in their own words:
“On 11-11, 2010, one million people across the globe will mentally project a unified vision of a new paradigm for our species… a new reality. The very real physics that connects human consciousness with molecular structure will be harnessed en masse during the largest scale simultaneous manifestation transmission in recorded history.”
What they basically explain on the website via a series of slides is that if a million people or more meditate simultaneously thinking of a better world, a better world will manifest itself. It uses some real scientific facts, draws completely incorrect and biased conclusions and asserts that such a thing is inevitable. This sounds similar to concepts propounded in Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, though that deals with more self-centred goals and objectives. (I have not read the book in full (or rather, I could not, despite my best efforts!), but I got the gist and the rest was accomplished via reading the Wikipedia entry and also other discussions, both in favour and against, about the book on the internet.)
I have nothing against the concept of meditation – if it helps one to achieve peace, or serves as a form of relaxation or introspection, it is mostly a healthy practice. And meditating or praying for a better world – what could be more noble? But just wishing for something does not work in the real world. If it did, the world would have been at least slightly better considering that many religious people (I am being optimistic here!) do pray about the state of the world after they have finished asking for their own health and prosperity. What will work is changing the mindset of the vast majority of our species and working towards creating a ‘new paradigm’ and not indulging in wishful thinking that we can wish it to fruition.
Frankly, I would normally ignore this kind of new-age crap since it is largely harmless, and might even have some use, if only in its adherents being more civilized and humane than the sociopaths that the dominant medieval religions breed. But my problem with this particular effort is in the attempts at deception and the extreme secrecy as to who is behind this.
The deception primarily is in the form of using pseudo Science to mislead people who (should, but) don’t know any better and are gullible enough to fear and worship anything they cannot comprehend. Coupled with this are claims from the people behind this endeavour of being “a fulltime international team of physicists and mathematicians”. (Well, I for one have never heard of part-time physicians and mathematicians!) What takes the cake is this,
“Unfortunately, we are not staffed to handle incoming e-mails or contact from the public or the media at this point.”
(For that would reveal the truth which is probably closer to the fact that we are a fulltime international team of quacks or fraudsters or both!)
That basically underlines the extreme secrecy associated with the perpetrators of this. I tried searching for over an hour on the internet to see if I can gather some information, to no avail. The website registration is private which in itself is not a big thing. But nothing on the website or on their Facebook or YouTube page or anywhere else on the internet correctly identifies what group is organising this event. That strikes me as odd and for the sake of all those well-meaning people who are registering I hope this is not just an elaborate scheme of some email harvesters and spammers. On 11-11, 2010, I will pray for you guys instead!
Sounds of the ‘God Particle’
What happens when a group of particle physicists, composers, software developers and artists get together? This!
You must have heard about the LHC experiment – the Large Hadron Collider. If not its scientific aspects, at least the doomsday theories surrounding it! LHC is a particle accelerator on the Switzerland-France border, 100m below the earth. The experiment consists of two beams of hadrons(either protons or lead ions) colliding head to head, after gaining high levels of energy, with each successive lap inside the circular accelerator. This is an attempt to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang and will be used by physicists to study the smallest known, fundamental particles, the ‘brick and mortar’ of our Universe, that is expected to be created in the collisions. A number of detectors will assist the physicists in this job and one such detector is called ATLAS.
So what is LHCsound?
LHCsound: the sonification of the ATLAS detector data output.
LHCsound is funded by the STFC as a public outreach project, but also has potential as a physics analysis/ detector monitoring tool and as a resource for musical composition and performance.
(Source:LHCsound Blog)
In other words, the results of the ATLAS detector has been turned in to sounds! The benefit for physicists is that, since the ear is more tuned to detect changes in patterns than the eye, it is likely that anomalies in expected patterns(new particles), if any, can be detected far more easily if the results were presented as sounds. This project is the brainchild of Lily Asquith, a high energy physicist working on the ATLAS and Richard Dobson, a musician and a software developer. And the results are über cool!
Listen to the Decay of a God Particle!
HiggsJetHarmSig2.mp3
For a detailed explanation on this sound file, please click here. For the complete set of sounds, here.
Image Courtesy of Toya Walker
(Thanks to Rishi, my physicist friend who works at CERN – his link to this BBC article on Facebook led to this post.)
Trailblazing – a virtual journey through Science
Welcome to Trailblazing, an interactive timeline for everybody with an interest in science. Compiled by scientists, science communicators and historians – and co-ordinated by Professor Michael Thompson FRS – it celebrates three and a half centuries of scientific endeavour and has been launched to commemorate the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary in 2010.
Trailblazing is a user-friendly, ‘explore-at-your-own-pace’, virtual journey through science. It showcases sixty fascinating and inspiring articles selected from an archive of more than 60,000 published by the Royal Society between 1665 and 2010.
Trailblazing – Three and a half centuries of Royal Society publishing
Doubt, Uncertainty & Not Knowing
“You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things. But I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit; if I can’t figure it out, then I go onto something else. But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell — possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.”
The Pale Blue Dot
On Valentine’s Day, 1990, Voyager 1, having completed its primary mission objectives, was ready to leave the Solar System. At the request of Carl Sagan, NASA got the spaceship to turn its camera back and take some parting shots of the planets. One photograph amongst them became famous as the ‘Pale Blue Dot‘ since our planet appeared on it as a pale pixel of light lost in the vastness of space. Carl used this photograph as a metaphor for our insignificance in the vast cosmic arena, on one hand and on the other, of how that dot of light was our only home.
A friend forwarded a link to a video by David Fu, who uses Carl’s voice and images from movies, sets it all to music, to create a very inspiring short film. (Thanks Joe!) The video is sure to leave you misty-eyed – I can vouch for that!
The text of Carl’s speech:
The spacecraft was a long way from home.
I thought it would be a good idea, just after Saturn, to have them take one last glance homeward. From Saturn, the Earth would appear too small for Voyager to make out any detail. Our planet would be just a point of light, a lonely pixel hardly distinguishable from the other points of light Voyager would see: nearby planets, far off suns. But precisely because of the obscurity of our world thus revealed, such a picture might be worth having.
It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos—but no one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance, and perhaps also our last for decades to come.
So, here they are: a mosaic of squares laid down on top of the planets in a background smattering of more distant stars. Because of the reflection of sunlight off the spacecraft, the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special significance to this small world; but it’s just an accident of geometry and optics. There is no sign of humans in this picture: not our reworking of the Earth’s surface; not our machines; not ourselves. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalisms is nowhere in evidence. We are too small. On the scale of worlds, humans are inconsequential: a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.
Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings; thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines; every hunter and forager; every hero and coward; every creator and destroyer of civilizations; every king and peasant, every young couple in love; every mother and father; hopeful child; inventor and explorer; every teacher of morals; every corrupt politician; every supreme leader; every superstar; every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.
Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings; how eager they are to kill one another; how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity—in all this vastness—there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the only home we’ve ever known.
The pale blue dot.
R.I.P.
The Danger of Science Denial
“Vaccine-autism claims, “Frankenfood” bans, the herbal cure craze: All point to the public’s growing fear (and, often, outright denial) of science and reason, says Michael Specter. He warns the trend spells disaster for human progress.”
Courtesy TED Talks.