Islands one and all ...

Credit: CCO Public Domain

The potential collapse of civilization becomes real given just how powerful an impact global warming will have on earth Earth as we move further into the future. Earth itself will survive as nature finds a way but for civilization to remain a viable enterprise becomes problematic at best. Presently, New Zealand seems to be the best bet to ride out a most violent storm of our own making based on recent research posted in the journal of Sustainability.

New research has examined the factors that could lead to the collapse of global civilisation, with New Zealand identified as the country most resilient to future threats.

The study, carried out by Nick King and Professor Aled Jones of the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), focuses on "de-complexification"—a widespread reversal of the trends of recent civilisation, potentially seeing the collapse of supply chains, international agreements and global financial structures.

Islands one and all ...

The study identified five countries with the most favorable starting conditions to survive a global collapse by examining self-sufficiency (energy and manufacturing infrastructure), carrying capacity (land available for arable farming and overall population) and isolation (distance from other large population centers which may be subject to displacement events).

It found that New Zealand—along with Iceland, the United Kingdom, Australia (specifically Tasmania) and Ireland—were the nations currently most suited to maintaining higher levels of societal, technological, and organizational complexity within their own borders if a global collapse were to happen.

All five are islands or island continents, with strong oceanic climatic influence. They currently have low temperature and precipitation variability and therefore have the greatest likelihood of relatively stable conditions continuing despite the effects of climate change.

Reassuring is it not?

Birth of a solar system

Observations by the ALMA telescope array in Chile show the young star PDS 70 surrounded by a dusty ring of debris. The bright dot just inside that ring is a disk of potentially moon-forming debris surrounding a young planet. ALMA/ESO, NAOJ AND NRAO, M. BENISTY ET AL

4+ billion years, our solar system looked like this one with a planet forming accreditation disk revolving around its parent star and a slightly older planet in the process of generating a moon of its own.

Planetary formation is a complicated, multilayered process.  Even with the influx of data on exoplanets, there are still only two known planets that are not yet fully formed.  Known as PDS 70b and PDS 70c, the two planets, which were originally found by the Very Large Telescope, are some of the best objects we have to flesh out our planetary formation models. And now, one of them has been confirmed to have a moon-forming disk around it.

Addendum: 

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile glimpsed a dusty disk of potentially moon-forming material around a baby exoplanet about 370 light-years from Earth. The Jupiter-like world is surrounded by enough material to make up to 2.5 Earth moons, researchers report online July 22 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Observations of this system could offer new insight into how planets and moons are born around young stars.

ALMA observed two planets, dubbed PDS 70b and 70c, circling the star PDS 70 in July 2019. Unlike most other known exoplanets, these two Jupiter-like worlds are still forming — gobbling up material from the disk of gas and dust swirling around their star (SN: 7/2/18). During this formation process, planets are expected to wrap themselves in their own debris disks, which control how planets pack on material and form moons.

Science done right yet again. 

Midsummer 2021

Midsummer, the time of flowers, insects and being outside on land or water is in play in this short clip. Enjoy.

A drive in the park :)

50 Years Ago, NASA Put a Car on the Moon

The lunar rovers of Apollo 15, 16 and 17 parked American automotive culture on the lunar surface, and expanded the scientific range of the missions’ astronaut explorers.

Back in the day, the US built stuff, good stuff indeed as seen by the lunar rovers that traversed the moon with great style and reliability.

Dave Scott was not about to pass by an interesting rock without stopping. It was July 31, 1971, and he and Jim Irwin, his fellow Apollo 15 astronaut, were the first people to drive on the moon. After a 6-hour inaugural jaunt in the new lunar rover, the two were heading back to their lander, the Falcon, when Mr. Scott made an unscheduled pit stop.

West of a crater called Rhysling, Mr. Scott scrambled out of the rover and quickly picked up a black lava rock, full of holes formed by escaping gas. Mr. Scott and Mr. Irwin had been trained in geology and knew the specimen, a vesicular rock, would be valuable to scientists on Earth. They also knew that if they asked for permission to stop and get it, clock-watching mission managers would say no. So Mr. Scott made up a story that they stopped the rover because he was fidgeting with his seatbelt. The sample was discovered when the astronauts returned to Earth, Mr. Scott described what he’d done, and “Seatbelt Rock” became one of the most prized geologic finds from Apollo 15.

A lasting legacy

Foldable, durable, battery-powered and built by Boeing and General Motors, the vehicle is seen by some as making the last three missions into the crowning achievement of the Apollo era.

IMHO, the US needs to be able to do this kind of thing again before it's too late. 

The "Nooze"

Empty vaccine vials at a vaccination site near Munich in May. Online disinformation campaigns targeting everything from vaccine manufacturers to elections have become a booming business.Credit...Matthias Schrader/Associated Press

We have no news. We have media platforms appealing to specific demographics in order to sell ads. Pundits spouting gossip on CSNBC or Fox or CNN is not news, its gossip and bloviating to the extreme, the exact opposite of AP or al jazeera who actually report news, not gossip. Well, it seems the ability to spout opinion has now descended into disinformation for sale and we haven't even talked about AI and its increasing impact on providing us rubes "news" from the digital side of the equation.

In May, several French and German social media influencers received a strange proposal.

A London-based public relations agency wanted to pay them to promote messages on behalf of a client. A polished three-page document detailed what to say and on which platforms to say it.

But it asked the influencers to push not beauty products or vacation packages, as is typical, but falsehoods tarring Pfizer-BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine. Stranger still, the agency, Fazze, claimed a London address where there is no evidence any such company exists.

Some recipients posted screenshots of the offer. Exposed, Fazze scrubbed its social media accounts. That same week, Brazilian and Indian influencers posted videos echoing Fazze’s script to hundreds of thousands of viewers.

The scheme appears to be part of a secretive industry that security analysts and American officials say is exploding in scale: disinformation for hire.

Not even the great Paddy Chayefsky could have predicted this sad turn of events. 

"Nooze" 24/7 awaits

It's all about geometry

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Electromagnetism is a branch of physics involving the study of the electromagnetic force, a type of physical interaction that occurs between electrically charged particles. The electromagnetic force is carried by electromagnetic fields composed of electric fields and magnetic fields, and it is responsible for electromagnetic radiation such as light. It is one of the four fundamental interactions (commonly called forces) in nature, together with the strong interaction, the weak interaction, and gravitation.[1] At high energy, the weak force and electromagnetic force are unified as a single electroweak force.

Researchers are now becoming increasingly convinced that the electroweak force, like gravity, may be a property of spacetime because ...

The electromagnetic force is responsible for practically all phenomena one encounters in daily life above the nuclear scale, with the exception of gravity. Roughly speaking, all the forces involved in interactions between atoms can be explained by the electromagnetic force acting between the electrically charged atomic nuclei and electrons of the atoms. Electromagnetic forces also explain how these particles carry momentum by their movement. This includes the forces we experience in "pushing" or "pulling" ordinary material objects, which result from the intermolecular forces that act between the individual molecules in our bodies and those in the objects. The electromagnetic force is also involved in all forms of chemical phenomena.

Representation of the electric field vector of a wave of circularly polarized electromagnetic radiation.

The mystery of electromagnetism

Electromagnetism has always been a subtle phenomenon. In the 19th century, scholars thought that electromagnetic waves must propagate in some sort of elusive medium, which was called aether. Later, the aether hypothesis was abandoned, and to this day, the classical theory of electromagnetism does not provide us with a clear answer to the question in which medium electric and magnetic fields propagate in vacuum. On the other hand, the theory of gravitation is rather well understood. General relativity explains that energy and mass tell the spacetime how to curve and spacetime tells masses how to move. Many eminent mathematical physicists have tried to understand electromagnetism directly as a consequence of general relativity. The brilliant mathematician Hermann Weyl had especially interesting theories in this regard. The Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla thought that electromagnetism contains essentially everything in our universe. So what is the mutual relationship of electromagnetism and gravitation? We provide one possible explanation to the riddle.

The link between general relativity and electromagnetism becomes clear by assuming that the so-called four-potential of electromagnetism directly determines the metrical properties of the spacetime. In particular, our research shows how electromagnetism is an inherent property of spacetime itself. In a way, spacetime itself is therefore the aether. Electric and magnetic fields represent certain local tensions or twists in the spacetime fabric. Our research shows that the Lagrangian of electrodynamics is just the Einstein-Hilbert action of general relativity; it reveals how Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism are an optimality condition for the metric of spacetime to be sufficiently flat. As Einstein's theory of general relativity provides that the metric is optimal in a sense, electromagnetism is hidden in the nonlinear differential equations of general relativity. On the other hand, this means that general relativity is a generalized theory of nonlinear electromagnetism.

It's all about geometry 

John Wheeler, the famous physicist, put forward the idea that all of the material world is constructed from the geometry of the spacetime. Our research strongly supports this kind of natural philosophy. It means that the material world always corresponds to some geometric structures of spacetime. Tensions in spacetime manifest themselves as electric and magnetic fields. Moreover, electric charge relates to some compressibility properties of spacetime. Electric current seems to be a re-balancing object, which transports charge in order to keep the spacetime manifold Ricci-flat. This is aesthetically pleasing, as nature seems to strive for harmony, efficiency and simplicity.

The ancient Greeks could relate to this would they not? :)

 

Plato's cave

 

Plato's allegory of the cave by Jan Saenredam, according to Cornelis van Haarlem, 1604, Albertina, Vienna

BRT has written copiously about The Limits of Knowledge as quantum reality works in ways beyond the kin of man. From Plato to Einstein, the quest to learn how existence works never ends as nature's the ultimate trickster, forever keeping the true essence of herself forever hidden from our prying eyes.

More than a half century ago, Richard Feynman advised us to accept that nature makes no sense. “Do not keep saying to yourself … ‘But how can [nature] be like that?’” Feynman warns in The Character of Physical Law, “because you will get ‘down the drain,’ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.” Most physicists have followed Feynman’s advice. Ignoring the oddness of quantum mechanics, they simply apply it to accomplish various tasks, such as predicting new particles or building more powerful computers.

Today, there are more interpretations than ever, but they deepen rather than dispel the mystery at the heart of things. The more I dwell on puzzles such as superposition, entanglement and the measurement problem, the more I identify with the piranha. I’m blindly thrashing about for insights, epiphanies, revelations. Every now and then I think I’ve grasped some slippery truth, but my satisfaction is always fleeting. Sooner or later, I end up crashing into an invisible barrier. I don’t really know where I am or what’s going on. I’m in the dark.

Plato's Cave, ...

In the allegory, Socrates describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners' reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world. Three higher levels exist: the natural sciences; mathematics, geometry, and deductive logic; and the theory of forms.

Socrates explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are actually not reality at all. A philosopher aims to understand and perceive the higher levels of reality. However, the other inmates of the cave do not even desire to leave their prison, for they know no better life.[1]

Allegory of the cave. From top to bottom: The sun ("good" ideas) Natural things (ideas) Reflections of natural things (mathematical objects) Fire (light) Artificial objects (creatures and objects) Shadows of artificial objects, allegory (image, analogy of the sun and of the divided line)

The limits of knowledge indeed ...

A true giant ...

Dr. Steven Weinberg at the University of Texas at Austin. Though he had the respect, almost awe, of his colleagues for his scientific abilities, he also possessed a rare ability among scientists to communicate and explain abstruse scientific ideas to the public.Credit...Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

A physics giant died, Steven Weinberg, who found out the weak force and electromagnetism were actually the same, helped to create the Standard Model to determine, in part, how reality works.

There are four known forces in the universe: gravity; electromagnetism; the strong force, which binds the nuclei of atoms together; and the weak force, which causes radioactive decay. The first two forces have been known for centuries, but the other two were discovered only in the first two decades of the 20th century.

The radioactive beta decay is due to the weak interaction, 

which transforms a neutron into a proton, an electron, and an electron antineutrino.

Dr. Weinberg theorized that there was a link between the photon and the W and Z bosons, suggesting that they were created by the same force. The conclusion was that, at very high energy levels, the electromagnetic and weak forces were one and the same. It was a step on the path to the unified theory that physicists had been searching for.

Dr. Weinberg published his findings in 1967 in a groundbreaking paper, “A Model of Leptons,” in the journal Physical Review Letters. The article is one of the most cited research papers in history.

His philosophy regarding science and its connect to existence is profound and unsparing.

Dr. Weinberg opposed religion, believing that it undermined efforts to seek and discover truth. In “The First Three Minutes” he wrote, “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”

In his interview with the Nobel Institute, he was asked him about his often-quoted line near the end of “The First Three Minutes” — “The more that the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

“What I meant by that statement is that there is no point to be discovered in nature itself; there is no cosmic plan for us,” he said. “We are not actors in a drama that has been written with us playing the starring role. There are laws — we are discovering those laws — but they are impersonal, they are cold.”

He added: “It is not an entirely happy view of human life. I think it is a tragic view, but that is not new to physicists. A tragic view of life has been expressed by so many poets — that we are here without purpose, trying to identify something that we care about.”

A giant indeed.

Gravitational lensing writ large

The center of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is framed by the tell-tale arcs that result from strong gravitational lensing, a striking astronomical phenomenon which can warp, magnify, or even duplicate the appearance of distant galaxies. 

With gravity's help, distant objects become visible.

Gravitational lensing occurs when light from a distant galaxy is subtly distorted by the gravitational pull of an intervening astronomical object. In this case, the relatively nearby galaxy cluster MACSJ0138.0-2155 has lensed a significantly more distant inactive galaxy – a slumbering giant known as MRG-M0138 which has run out of the gas required to form new stars and is located 10 billion light-years away. Astronomers can use gravitational lensing as a natural magnifying glass, allowing them to inspect objects like distant dormant galaxies which would usually be too difficult for even Hubble to resolve.

Einstein would be proud.

 

Microtubules et al

Fractals, Menger Sponges, Koch Curves,  Sierpiński Triangles and the Cantor Set, among significant others, fascinate to no end as all encapsulate infinity in finite space. With this in mind, this notion of infinity, linked to chaos and quantum mechanics, is now being looked at as a viable possibility of whether the brain processes information in quantum fashion as we are quantum beings living in a quantum reality 24/7. 

The evolution of the Sierpinski triangle

Quantum reality 101

Micrograph of the resonator. (Courtesy: Aaron O'Connell and Andrew Cleland)

Physicists in California have observed true quantum behavior in a macroscopic object big enough to be seen with the naked eye. This is the first time this feat has been achieved and it could shed light on the mysterious boundaries between the classical and quantum worlds.

Question, does the brain think in quantum?

One of the most important open questions in science is how our consciousness is established. In the 1990s, long before winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his prediction of black holes, physicist Roger Penrose teamed up with anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff to propose an ambitious answer.

They claimed that the brain’s neuronal system forms an intricate network and that the consciousness this produces should obey the rules of quantum mechanics – the theory that determines how tiny particles like electrons move around. This, they argue, could explain the mysterious complexity of human consciousness.

Penrose and Hameroff were met with incredulity. Quantum mechanical laws are usually only found to apply at very low temperatures. Quantum computers, for example, currently operate at around -272°C. At higher temperatures, classical mechanics takes over. Since our body works at room temperature, you would expect it to be governed by the classical laws of physics. For this reason, the quantum consciousness theory has been dismissed outright by many scientists – though others are persuaded supporters.

The Microtubule is the start point for the Penrose-Hameroff quantum consciousness theory.

Microtubule and tubulin metrics[1]

A: An axon terminal releases neurotransmitters through a synapse and are received by microtubules in a neuron's dendritic spine. B: Simulated microtubule tubulins switch states.[1]

Our brains are composed of cells called neurons, and their combined activity is believed to generate consciousness. Each neuron contains microtubules, which transport substances to different parts of the cell. The Penrose-Hameroff theory of quantum consciousness argues that microtubules are structured in a fractal pattern which would enable quantum processes to occur.

Fractals reside everywhere from tree branching to lungs to Escher so ...

This extension of Escher’s Circle Limit III shows its fractal, repeating nature.  Vladimir-Bulatov/Deviantart, CC BY-NC-SA

it stands to reason quantum effects can occur in fractal constructs if one is creative and smart enough to make it happen.

This was an exciting finding, but STM techniques cannot probe how quantum particles move – which would tell us more about how quantum processes might occur in the brain. So in our latest research, my colleagues at Shanghai Jiaotong University and I went one step further. Using state-of-the-art photonics experiments, we were able to reveal the quantum motion that takes place within fractals in unprecedented detail.

We achieved this by injecting photons (particles of light) into an artificial chip that was painstakingly engineered into a tiny Sierpiński triangle. We injected photons at the tip of the triangle and watched how they spread throughout its fractal structure in a process called quantum transport. We then repeated this experiment on two different fractal structures, both shaped as squares rather than triangles. And in each of these structures we conducted hundreds of experiments.

We also conducted experiments on a square-shaped fractal called the Sierpiński carpet.  

Johannes Rössel/wikimedia

End result

Our observations from these experiments reveal that quantum fractals actually behave in a different way to classical ones. Specifically, we found that the spread of light across a fractal is governed by different laws in the quantum case compared to the classical case.

This new knowledge of quantum fractals could provide the foundations for scientists to experimentally test the theory of quantum consciousness. If quantum measurements are one day taken from the human brain, they could be compared against our results to definitely decide whether consciousness is a classical or a quantum phenomenon.

Penrose-Hameroff might be right after all.