Capturing the Flight of an Electron on Video

Flight of the electron

Swedish scientists recently announced the ability to capture the image of a single electron. This was previously impossible due to the electron's high speed and sensitivity to energy. LiveScience is hosting a video of an electron riding on a light wave after having been pulled away from an atom.

The video doesn't clearly show the electron in flight, but rather a series of pulsating, concentric rings, so it's hard to visualize. The timeframe of the video takes place during the oscillation of a single wavelenth of light, but has been slowed down for human consumption. The soundtrack for the video is corny, so be advised.

What really made my jaw drop, though, was reading the news story on LiveScience about how the scientists used short bursts of laser light, called attosecond pulses, to capture the movement. How short is an attosecond?

"It takes about 150 attoseconds for an electron to circle the nucleus of an atom. An attosecond is 10^-18 seconds long, or, expressed in another way: an attosecond is related to a second as a second is related to the age of the universe," said Johan Mauritsson of Lund University in Sweden [emphasis added].

Creating an Out of Body Experience

ithaca by ::sarmax::

The BBC reported that researchers have found a way to manufacture an out-of-body experience. Their experiment included one technique that employed a video camera that filmed the subject from behind. The subject, wearing virtual-reality goggles, sees a researcher in the video feed touch his back. This creates an experience that is similar to an OOBE.

When I read this article, I knew just what they were talking about. I've tried to describe this feeling to friends, but they just look at me like I'm crazy.

I get this feeling when I'm standing in line at the bank.

The security camera system has a monitor showing the bank line. When I look up, I see a live video image of myself from behind. This makes me feel uncomfortable, as if my self has been divided in two.

Also, there's something unresolvable about it. I know that know that light is bouncing off my body, through the camera lens to the monitor, and through my eyes to my brain, and yet it feels like information is traveling the opposite direction from my brain around to my back.

I also get this same creepy feeling when I accidentally see my own blood bubbling into a tube during a blood draw. I think, "How can I be in two different spaces at the same time?"

Why We Believe in God

Buddha said he wanted to have a word with me by Stuck in Customs

The March 4 New York Times Magazine had an article about the debate among evolutionary biologists regarding why humans believe in God. Religion is so persistent in human history, scientists can't help but see it as a trait that has evolved in us, like opposable thumbs or hairless skin. But because it exists in the mind, the debate resolves around whether religious belief is an adaptation or the perhaps useless side-product of other adaptations.

The adaptationists say that religion helps bind us to other people, where we get advantages of the group--others to look after us when we're sick or with whom we can share resources. Also, being ostensibly religious may help us build our reputation, which would provide access to better mates.

The "useless side product" camp tells us that we are primed to a belief in God by specifically three mind "modules." The first, called "agent detection," makes us able to quickly identify threats, such as a bear in the brush or a car pulling out of a drive way, and engages other mechanisms that will preserve our welfare. Sometimes, though, agent detection makes us perceive things that aren't there--like a better-safe-than-sorry reflex. "Casual reasoning" is our ability to construct narratives, even counterfactual ones, to explain phenomena in our lives. Lastly, "theory of mind" is the ability in humans to recognize--and simulate in their own minds--the thoughts of others. Playing chess and anticipating your opponent's next move is a good example of this ability, as is the act of persuading others. These three traits, they assert, make it natural for us to believe in an omnipotent, disembodied presence; the ultimate predator, the ultimate parent.

Interesting as these arguments are, they bother me because both presuppose that God does not exist. That idea seems as off-balance as the creationist "intelligent design" view of the world.

To me, a "universal belief" is one most likely to be true. There are all sorts of wacky, local beliefs that are easy to dismiss chiefly because they are local.

We can't all agree on God's gender, appearance, origin, special powers, commandments or even whether there's one or many gods, but every collection of people throughout history has believed in a creative force superior to our own.

What really makes it easy for us to believe in God is the constant reinforcement of cause and effect in our life. The tree falls down because the wind blows. The prey dies because our arrow pierces it.

I had a conversation about God with a guy in a bar once. He said something very profound. "If you ask any religious person what the one constant in life is, he'll say 'God.' If you ask any secular person the same question, he'll say 'change.' Now, one person can be stupid, but not vast groups of people. All these people are correct if God is change."

Just those three words, God is change makes a lot of sense to me. It answers many of my questions.

So Long Big Bang, Hello Big Bounce

A scientific paper was released yesterday in the online version of the journal Nature Physics that may provide answers not only to the origin of our Universe, but may describe some conditions of what was there before.

Martin Bojowald, assistant professor of physics at Penn State has found a way to combine some calculations of quantum physics, which is very good at describing very extreme units of energy and mass, with classical physics, which is better at describing things like orbits and gravity. Physicists have been trying for nearly a century to reconcile the two types into a unified theory that would cast a better light, as it were, into how the Universe works.

When Albert Einstein was working on the problem of the Universe's origin, his calculations showed that the Big Bang resulted from a "singularity" of infinite mass and energy with zero volume. This would have meant that all the planets and stars originated from nothing. While that might be a satisfying answer for poets and preachers, it's not been at all satisfying for science.

Bojowald's theory, called Loop Quantum Gravity, is able to describe a condition of Universal start that has a mass and energy less than infinite and a volume greater than zero. The Big Bang, then, becomes the Big Bounce where our Universe was born out of the contraction of another Universe with a similar space-time geometry.

According to Quantum Gravity, a theory upon which Bojowald's theory was built, the Universe is comprised at the sub-atomic level of one-dimensional quantum threads. Under the extreme energy conditions of the Big Bounce, these threads react in a way that throws gravity into reverse--instead of attracting, it repels.

Loop Quantum Gravity theory uses sets of equations to figure things out going backwards in time through the bounce and further still into the previous condition. One very interesting indication of this theory is that the previous Universe is not likely to be a copy of our own. According to the Penn State Web site:

The model's equations also contain some "free" parameters that are not yet known precisely but are nevertheless necessary to describe certain properties. Bojowald discovered that two of these free parameters are complementary: one is relevant almost exclusively after the Big Bounce and the other is relevant almost exclusively before the Big Bounce. Because one of these free parameters has essentially no influence on calculations of our current universe, Bojowald colludes that it cannot be used as a tool for back-calculating its value in the earlier universe before the Big Bounce.

Also, Bojowald found that at least one of the parameters used to describe the previous state was useless in describing this one. This leads him to conclude, "the eternal recurrence of absolutely identical universes would seem to be prevented by the apparent existence of an intrinsic cosmic forgetfulness."

It's About Time We Acted Like Adults

It's a bit odd to go into a darkened movie theater--the scene of American escapism for the last one hundred years--to receive such a brisk wake-up call. Still, watching this movie in a theater with hundreds of strangers is, I think, the best way to view it because we are all in this together.

If you've been politically aware in the last 10 years, chances are there isn't any one fact in this movie that you haven't heard before. It is a shocking movie nonetheless, and the shock comes from seeing all those facts marshalled together, presenting a clear-cut case. Here's the inconvenient truth: the earth is getting warmer, that our actions are the reasons why it is getting warmer, and that we must all work together to solve this problem or else it will become a crisis for humanity.

The good news is that there are things we can do now that will hopefully avert or diminish the coming havoc, but the first step is learning about the problem. Even though this film is intercut with scenes that often feel like a Al Gore political ad, it's the best way for most people to learn about this problem. The data is explained in easy-to-digest graphics and examples.

I urge you to see this movie. Take your parents, take your kids. Let's save ourselves before it's too late.

This Monster Will Find You Even Under the Bed

Secret Monster

It's getting harder and harder to find reputable scientists who dispute the dangers of global warming. It's coming. It won't be pretty. I just read an interview in Wired magazine of Tim Flannery, director of the South Australian Museum, biologist at the University of Adelaide, and author of the book The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth. In it, he bemoans how all the computer models show disaster coming and yet some governments, like our own, are completely in denial of the problem. In a particularly spooky part of the interview, he describes our future:

Just play a little thought game: We're 10 years out now; it's 2016. Sea levels have started to rise quickly. And governments around the world are spending even more money than they are now in defending their low-lying areas. How much is the U.S. spending right now in New Orleans? Imagine that cost replicated right around the southern and eastern coast of the U.S. And partly on the West Coast, too.

Imagine oil prices twice or three times what they are today. Imagine the increased problems of hurricanes and insurance losses at the same time. And imagine the problems of water availability as well, because we're getting a lot of extreme weather. That all adds up to a society under enormous stress. Is that society going to have the resources to invest in the new energy infrastructure that we need to build in order to eventually diminish those problems? Because changing energy infrastructure won't help sea-level rise for half a century. It won't help defend your city against this immediately rising ocean.

I feel like we're living in a country of King Louis XVs. He (or his mistress, history is unclear) was the one who said, "Après moi le déluge." "After me the flood."

Prayer Research

There's a story in the NYT this morning about the controversy surrounding Federal funding of research into the healing power of prayer. Aside from the fact that on its face it seems like a sham (and the lead was about how one of the researchers has just plead guilty to fraud in an unrelated case), the article is interesting for the number of studies into the idea and for the resistance it gets from religious people. Both sides of the debate say that prayer has nothing to do with science and science has nothing to do with prayer. However, there have been a few studies that indicate something is going on. Studies of heart patients and infertile couples show benefits for patients for whom prayers are said. Some think that maybe there's other stuff going on, like subtle directed peer-to-peer energies or mind communication. That cheeses both the scientists and the churches off.