Posted on 02/19/2003 9:18:15 AM PST by RightWhale
Extra Dimensions Showing Hints Of Scientific Revolution
Chicago - Feb 19, 2003
The concept of extra dimensions, dismissed as nonsense even by one of its earliest proponents nearly nine decades ago, may soon help solve seemingly unrelated problems in particle physics, cosmology and gravitational physics, according to a panel of experts who spoke Feb. 15 at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Denver.
"It doesn't happen often that you get a confluence of ideas and experiments that come together and it's something that obviously would change your whole way of looking at the universe," said one of the panelists, Joseph Lykken, Professor in Physics at the University of Chicago and a scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Even though scientists lack direct evidence of extra dimensions, "we have a number of hints from experiments and theoretical ideas that make us think they're probably out there. That's why we're so excited about looking for them," Lykken said. On the theoretical side, string theory, developed over the past two decades, requires that space-time has extra dimensions if it is to include gravity. "It's just built into the way that string theory works," Lykken said.
Experiments, meanwhile, have produced the standard model of physics to describe the most elementary particles and the forces that hold them together. Physicists have come to suspect that something is missing from the standard model. "There seems to be more particles and forces than we really need, and they operate in more complicated ways than they need to," Lykken said. But extra dimensions may ultimately help explain these data complications. "That standard model itself may be our biggest hint that there's this world of extra dimensions," he said.
New experiments at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are producing data that just don't fit the standard model, said Maria Spiropulu an Enrico Fermi Fellow at the University of Chicago. "We have things in the data that leave our mouths hanging," she said. Whether extra dimensions or some other phenomenon emerges to clarify these murky data, scientists seem certain that they stand only a few years away from a scientific revolution. "What's going on right now in particle physics, gravitational physics and cosmology is like when quantum mechanics started coming together," Spiropulu said.
Quantum mechanics, developed in the 1920s, describes the physics of objects at the atomic level and dominates the concepts of modern physics. Spiropulu, who organized the AAAS session on the physics of extra dimensions, spoke at the session along with scientists from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Harvard University and the universities of Chicago and Washington. Another panelist, Sean Carroll, Assistant Professor in Physics at the University of Chicago, said that extra dimensions could help solve two mysteries in cosmology: what were the initial conditions of the universe and what is the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of the universe. The idea of an inflationary universe, one that expanded rapidly just moments after the big bang, has gained wide acceptance among cosmologists to explain how conditions in the early universe could be unexpectedly different from what they later came to be. But inflationary cosmology tells scientists nothing about the initial conditions of the universe. This is where extra dimensions come in, even though they might be microscopically small.
"If you had extra dimensions, then when the universe is very small at early times, the extra dimensions weren't small compared to the rest of the universe," Carroll said. "They must have played a big role. What was that role? Could the role have something to do how we perceive the initial conditions?" Extra dimensions may also explain dark energy. Physicists conjecture that dark energy is governed partly by occurrences in the familiar four dimensions and partly by occurrences in the extra dimensions, Carroll explained. "There is the tantalizing possibility that a complete change of perspective makes all of the problems collapse at once," he said.
The 36-member, international “Boomerang” (Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geomagnetics) collaboration, led by Andrew Lange of Caltech and Paolo de Bernardis of the University of Rome, confirms that a plot of CMB strength peaks at a multipole value of about 197 (corresponding to CMB patches about one degree in angular spread), very close to what theorists had predicted for a cosmology in which the universe’s overall curvature is zero and the existence of cold dark matter is invoked…
The shape of the observed pattern of temperature variations suggests that a disturbance very like a sound wave moving through air passed through the high- density primordial fluid and that the CMB map can be can be thought of as a sort of sonogram of the infant universe. (de Bernardis et al., Nature, 27 April 2000.)
Big Bang Evidence Found – 5/2/2001
“The early universe is full of sound waves compressing and rarefying matter and light, much like sound waves compress and rarefy air inside a flute or trumpet,” explained Paolo deBernardis of the University of Rome La Sapienza, one of the members of the Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics (BOOMERanG) team. “For the first time the new data show clearly the harmonics of these waves.”
Harmonics in the Early Universe – 6/5/2001
The MAXIMA, BOOMERANG, and DASI collaborations, which measure minute variations in the CMB, recently reported new results at the American Physical Society meeting in Washington, D.C. All three agree remarkably about what the “harmonic proportions” of the cosmos imply: not only is the universe flat, but its structure is definitely due to inflation, not to topological defects in the early universe.
The results were presented as plots of slight temperature variations in the CMB that graph sound waves in the dense early universe. These high-resolution “power spectra” show not only a strong primary resonance but are consistent with two additional harmonics, or peaks.
The peaks indicate harmonics in the sound waves that filled the early, dense universe. Until some 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was so hot that matter and radiation were entangled in a kind of soup in which sound waves (pressure waves) could vibrate. The CMB is a relic of the moment when the universe had cooled enough so that photons could "decouple" from electrons, protons, and neutrons; then atoms formed and light went on its way.
By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth. – Psalms 33:6
(AP) Imagine the human genome as music. Unravel DNA's double helix, picture its components lined up like piano keys and assign a note to each. Run your finger along the keys...
French-born composer Richard Krull turned DNA sequences - a snippet of a gene might look like AGCGTATACGAGT - into sheet music. He arbitrarily assigned tones of the eight-note, do-re-mi scale to each letter. Thymine became re, for instance. Guanine is so, adenine la and cytosine do.
Played solo on percussion, classical guitar or the other instruments used on the CD, the sequences would sound cute but rudimentary, the musical equivalent of PacMan in an era of Microsoft Xbox.
So the alphabet soup of bases served as just that, base lines to accompany melodies composed by Krull and his scientific colleague. They say the melodies were influenced, even dictated, by the mood and rhythm of the underlying genetic code.
There is provided a method for determining the musical notes associated with an amino acid sequence, the musical periods of the sequence, the lengths of the notes, and the tone quality of the notes through the retroaction of the whole set of amino acids and using that information to regulate the biosynthesis of the protein. The amino acids that build a protein emit a signal of quantum nature at a certain frequency. Following the properties of this signal, the frequency is transposed into a musical note. This discovery has numerous applications since one can then deduce from the amino acid sequence of a protein a sequence of notes composing the melody that will act to stimulate or inhibit its synthesis inside an organism, wherefrom one can in addition delimit its biological functions.
Just my two cents…
Some think the Kabala is exactly the laws of modern physics, encoded.
The only way avoid a solution of zero is to have a singularity inside the contour. Cauchy's formula.
I'm still inclined to extra dimensional solutions and believe they are consistent with the Word. But for lurkers interested in the three dimensional solution:
Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG), rival of string theory in the quest to unite quantum mechanics with general relativity, does not suffer from certain mathematical "infinities" (corresponding to ephemeral, but numerous, alternatives in the way that interactions take place in spacetime), a new study shows. This clears up some doubts as to the theory's usefulness.
What is LQG, and why has it been so difficult to quantize gravity? To address this question, return to classical (pre-1900) physics, a regime in which space was fixed. Then the relativity and quantum revolutions changed everything utterly. With the advent of general relativity, space was combined with time in an integrated, but deformable, spacetime. Meanwhile, in quantum mechanics spacetime remains fixed but matter becomes fuzzy; the whereabouts of particles can only be expressed in terms of probability clouds. In a theory that would combine quantum and gravity features, spacetime would then have to be both deformable and fuzzy, and this has been difficult to do. In string theory, the merger is accomplished by imagining that matter ultimately consists of tiny strings. In loop theory, the merger is attempted by imagining that space itself consists of moveable tiny loops.
Carlo Rovelli (Center for Theoretical Physics, Marseilles, rovelli@cpt.univ-mrs.fr, 33-0491-269644; also University of Pittsburgh) argues that loop theory does not have to import the extra commodities (additional dimensions and particles) needed by string theory and that it offers, in principle, more testable predictions, such as the idea of quantized surface areas (that is, regions of space would come in discrete chunks and there would be a minimum possible size scale) and the notion that quantized spacetime might manifest itself as a minute difference in the speed of light for different colors. The new version of loop gravity studied by Rovelli and his colleagues pictures spacetime as being foamy: points in space sometimes grow into bubbles. The bubbles are not "in" space but constitute space itself.
There's a new girl on the block on another thread, and I wanted to link her to your home page. She seems to think Clinton wasn't that bad.
"I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know–God knows."
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