Scientific replication

This is why I think any religious or metaphysical belief should be based on observable empirical evidence, not the ravings of some sunstruck desert nomads.

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Visualising the substance of the universe

How cool is it that we can photograph an atoms moving inside a molecule? From Popsci

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The infinite universe

Thanks to Wired Science for this cool bit of news:

A space telescope peering into the Milky Way galaxy’s dusty core has spied a colossal twisted ribbon of supercooled material.

Until now astronomers had only seen bits and pieces of the ribbon’s 600-light-year-wide superstructure, which resembles the symbol for infinity: ∞.

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Its life Tym, but not as we know it.

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I've been interested in the claim by Dr. Richard Hoover, as astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight centre, that he’s found alien life.

As this Gizmodo article notes: "Hoover is being incredibly open about his paper. As stated above, peer scrutiny has already begun, to the tune of 100 experts who have started dissecting his work in advance of its official publication. "

However, after a bit of hunting, I came across this article which led me to this wonderful blog entry by one of my former (and all time greatest) lecturers at UBC, Rosie Redfield.

Rosie, whose judgment I know to be both fair and incisive, concluded:

The Ivuna meteorite sample showed a couple of micron-scale squiggles, one of which contained about 2.5-fold more carbon than the background. One of the five Orguil samples had at least one patch of clustered fibers; these contained more sulfur and magnesium than the background, and less silicon. As evidence for life this is pathetic, no better than that presented by McKay's group for the ALH84001 Martian meteorite in 1996.

She continued on to note that the Journal and the Editor aren't very impressive either:

The journal proudly announces that it is obtaining and will publish 100 post-publication reviews. But did it bother getting any pre-publication reviews? It will be shutting down in a few months, after only two years of on-line publication (the 13 'volumes' are really just 13 issues). Its presentation standards are pretty bad - there doesn't seem to have been any effort at copy-editing or formatting the text for publication (not even any page numbers).

Reminds me a bit of Rosie's critique of my final paper, which had to be in the form of a grant application related to the topic of Microbial Sex. Except she was less scathing. At least a little..

UPDATE: I just went and checked out the original article source at  http://journalofcosmology.com/Life100.html. One look at the design and I had to laugh. It's like the late 90's all over again!

Is Christian Science an oxymoron

I know it's not, but sometimes I wonder.

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The universe beats like a heart

Or rather, a heart beats like the universe

From Wired;

Most cosmologists trace the birth of the universe to the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. But a new analysis of the relic radiation generated by that explosive event suggests the universe got its start eons earlier and has cycled through myriad episodes of birth and death, with the Big Bang merely the most recent in a series of starting guns.

Dark circles indicate regions in space where the cosmic microwave background has temperature variations that are lower than average. The features hint that the universe was born long before the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago and had undergone myriad cycles of birth and death before that time. arXiv/V.G. Gurzadyan and R. Penrose. Source.

Warp 9 - engage

Scientists have captured antimatter atoms for the first time. From http://articles.cnn.com/2010-11-18/world/switzerland.cern.antimatter_1_antihydrogen-matter-and-antimatter-cern?_s=PM:WORLD

Researchers at CERN, the Geneva-based particle physics laboratory, have managed to confine single antihydrogen atoms in a magnetic trap.

[...]

To trap just 38 atoms, they had to run the experiment 335 times, says Nature which published the report findings.

Wahoo. One step closer to Star Trek,  that glorious socialist self-improving society in space. Next up, warp drive powered by matter/anti-matter reaction.

A Theologian, Philosopher and a Scientist walk into a Bar

Choose your own punchline

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Alternative lifestyle fact check

Gotta love XKCD

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Scales of magnitude - Powers of Ten / Cosmic Zoom

I'm sure I've never seen eiother of these before, but the amazing thing is that I wanted to do the exact same thing myself a few years ago. Maybe its something I've somehow seen before?

In any case, its still a thing of wonder - just need to finish the last step from sub-atomic particles down to string theory.

Kant and a priori knowledge

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Re-reading one of the seminal books of my youth - Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - and it occurred to me that the term 'a priori', as attributed to Kant, could be renamed to a subsconscious mental model.

Consider these quotes where the terms around 'a priori' (such as  priori concept) has been replaced with "mental model"

Unless we apply the concepts of space and time to the impressions we receive, the world is unintelligible, just a kaleidoscopic jumble of colors and patterns and noises and smells and pain and tastes without meaning. We sense objects in a certain way because of our application of mental models such as space and time, but we do not create these objects out of our imagination, as pure philosophical idealists would maintain. The forms of space and time are applied to data as they are received from the object producing them. The metal models have their origins in human nature so that they're neither caused by the sensed object nor bring it into being, but provide a kind of screening function for what sense data we will accept.

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Kant called his thesis that our mental model are independent of sense data and screen what we see a ``Copernican revolution.'' By this he referred to Copernicus' statement that the earth moves around the sun. Nothing changed as a result of this revolution, and yet everything changed. Or, to put it in Kantian terms, the objective world producing our sense data did not change, but our mental model of it was turned inside out. The effect was overwhelming. It was the acceptance of the Copernican revolution that distinguishes modern man from his medieval predecessors.

What Copernicus did was take the existing mental model of the world, the notion that it was flat and fixed in space, and pose an alternative mental model of the world, that it's spherical and moves around the sun; and showed that both of the mental models fitted the existing sensory data.

Of course - a mental model is a pattern of thought, which means that it is part of the pattern of sentience. This needs to be added to the Sentience Theory wiki I'm developing.

Black holes spawn baby universes

The Einstein-Cartan-Kibble-Sciama theory of gravity - which I'm sure has to be called the ECKS theory - is very cool especially because it seems to reinforce myths of the phoenix-like creation of life out of death.

From http://io9.com/5586017/was-our-universe-born-inside-a-black-hole-in-another-universe

This potentially means that many of the black holes in our own universe are the incubators of entirely new universes, each separated by the infinite time gap of the event horizon. That said, some properties of the mother universe could trickle through to its daughters, and detecting some of these properties could actually provide experimental proof of the theory. In fact Poplawski speculates this inheritance of properties could solve another great mystery of cosmology.

 It would also explain why I never liked the term 'white hole' - because, if I understand this theory correctly,  material from a black hole does not comes out  from a white hole somewhere else, instead it creates a new universes.

However, it means that my visualisation the universe has changed - whereas before I imagined it as bumps and swirls on an infinity of strings that loop around to forma a torus, I now suspect that the strings are interconnected like a web - branching and rebranching - some to die off and others to spawn. The family tree of God.  

It also reinforces my personal belief that the mulitversal consciousness - or God, if you prefer - is a sentience that that can recreate itself. More on that when i finally get around to publishing my sentience theory.

We are all wormhole aliens?

I believe that "the universe beats like a heart, or rather a heart beats like a universe

From http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/04/does-our-universe-live-inside-a-.html?rss=1&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&sms_ss=digg

The big bang theory holds that our universe began as a single point—or singularity—about 13.7 billion years ago that has been expanding outward ever since. Perhaps, Poplawski argues, we need to consider that something existed before the big bang that gave rise to it.

Enter the wormhole. According to Poplawski's calculations, the collapse of a giant star in another universe could have created a wormhole, a space-time conduit to another universe. Between these two openings, conditions could have developed that were similar to those we associate with the big bang, and therefore our universe could have formed within the wormhole.

Time travel essentials

Originally created by Dinosaur Comics and available on a T-Shirt - or a big print out. No downloadable PDF though, which is a shame as I now have to set back my trip to the past while I wait for delivery.