It's useless science Friday in my head - Welcome to the show.

[Sean88gt]

So, like, we are all surfers, like riding the gravity wave man.

[Strychnine]

So this is evidence in favor of the gravity waves theory?

I may have started college as a physics major but I did not finish as one, so the italicized is someone else's synopsis:

The scientists said: "The long search for tensor B-modes is apparently over, and a new era of B-mode cosmology has begun."

B-mode describes a specific type of cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization that's associated with gravitational waves. From these polarized waves they add not only another piece of evidence for inflation but measured a critical parameter that puts constraints on what happened during the Big Bang.

All models from this day forward will have to incorporate this newly measured value. These new models will create predictions which will then become next-generation discoveries.

Basically by confirming the existence of gravity waves they canconfirm that all forces were once unified, or pure energy - which means there is a "Grand Unifiying Theory" out there somewhere. That means that there should be a way to describe gravity in the same way we describe electromagnetism, nuclear forces, etc. which is something that has eluded physicists forever.

At the point in time (which corresponds to distance, or redshift in a spacetime universe) when the forces decouple from one another, the particles that interact with them become like seperate, non-interacting fluids. When you look at a plot of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) field, what you're seeing is the light that's reaching us now from the surface of last scattering. This is the point in time when the electroweak force decoupled and matter stopped being constantly ionized by the super-energetic photon fluid that permeated everything then.

This experiment is very similar, but we're looking at a surface which exists waaaay beyond recombination, right when inflation began and gravitation started to decouple through the Higgs mechanism. At this time, the mass distribution of the universe was very wonky (to put things rather unscientifically), and these perturbations resulted in what is analogous to a magnetic component in EM fields. The detection of such B-components is consistent with what we previously thought the Higgs field must be doing right before inflation began, and so it tells us that our idea of a grand unified theory existing just before this time is probably correct.

It also strongly reinforces the theory of gravitons.

[Strychnine]

And here's some more on the significance...

There is a theory, known as cosmic inflation, that says shortly after the big bang the universe was expanding faster than the speed of light. This theory made many predictions (like the universe is flat) but the most convincing one would be a direct detection of the super-luminal expanding space.

This is that later detection. We know that different spots in the sky were not able to communicate with each other since they were outside of each other's light cone. The light cone is the furtherest information could travel since nothing can travel faster than light. So what this experiment has shown is that the spacetime, the gravitational waves, are correlated in these spots as if they were communicating with each other. And the only way that is possible is if the spacetime was expanding faster than the speed of light. And this is the definition of inflation so this is why we are saying it is s confirmation of inflation.

This is one of those things worthy of a Nobel Prize

[Ratt]

So, this basically translates to a theory that we should (at some point in the very distant future, obviously) be able to travel faster than the speed of light. If matter and other forms of energy can do so, then it should be possible for the right people to come up with a system of propulsion that could do it.

Most excellent.

[Strychnine]

Not quite. The energy did not move faster than the speed of light. What they are saying is that they have confirmed that in the beginning the boundary of the universe expanded faster than the speed of light.

A classic example is a balloon. Take a balloon and put two dots on it then blow it up. The space between the dots will grow. Anything moving between the two dots (light, radio waves, etc) would be limited to the speed of light... though the balloon itself was expanding faster than the speed of light.

what the experiment did was confirm that there are similar waves on opposite sides of the universe over a distance too great for them to be the same if they just traveled at the speed of light. They had to travel at that speed while in a medium that was also expanding at an insanely incomprehensible rate... I don't think I'm doing this justice. I'll try to come up with a visual to help this one

[mstng86]

Can you break out a cardboard display board and have charts. We need charts. Flow charts preferably.

[Strychnine]

Can you break out a cardboard display board and have charts. We need charts. Flow charts preferably.

info: http://www.kurzweilai.net/first-dire...smic-inflation
There's more info and pics there.

http://legacy.kek.jp/intra-e/feature/2009/CMB.html

[Sean88gt]

So the universe started from the reservoir tip, which is now used to prevent the big bang?

[Baron Von Crowder]

So the universe started from the reservoir tip, which is now used to prevent the big bang?

+1 internets

[helosailor]

Here's some more inter-planetary science for you guys.
A friend of mine is at the 45th LPSC, she said it was amazing hearing Jason speak about his findings...
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26622586

Scientists believe they have detected the first liquid waves on the surface of another world.

The signature of isolated ripples was observed in a sea called Punga Mare on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan.

However, these seas are filled not with water, but with hydrocarbons like methane and ethane.

These exist in their liquid state on Titan, where the surface temperature averages about -180C.

Planetary scientist Jason Barnes discussed details of his findings at the 45th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in Texas this week.


"We think we've found the first waves outside the Earth”

Dr Jason Barnes
University of Idaho
Titan is a strange, looking-glass version of Earth with a substantial atmosphere and a seasonal cycle. Wind and rain shape the surface to form river channels, seas, dunes and shorelines.

But much of what's familiar is also turned sideways: the moon's mountains and dune fields are made of ice, rather than rock or sand, and liquid hydrocarbons take up many of the roles played by water on Earth.

The vast majority of Titan's lakes and seas are concentrated around the north polar region. Just one of these bodies of liquid - Ligeia Mare - is estimated to contain about 9,000 cubic km of mostly liquid methane, equating to about 40 times the proven reserves of oil and gas on Earth.

An image of Titan's north pole taken by the Cassini probe during a flyby in July 2012 shows sunlight being reflected from surface liquid in much the same way as a mirror re-directs light. This phenomenon is known as a specular reflection.

Titan is Saturn's largest moon and the second biggest in the Solar System
It is the only moon in the Solar System with clouds and a substantial atmosphere
Wind and rain create similar features to those found on Earth, such as dunes, lakes and rivers
But on Titan it rains liquid methane, filling the rivers, lakes and seas with hydrocarbons
Dr Barnes, from the University of Idaho in Moscow, US, used a mathematical model to investigate whether the features in the image were compatible with waves.

"We think we've found the first waves outside the Earth," he told the meeting.

"What we're seeing seems to be consistent with waves at just a few locations in Punga Mare [with a slope] of six degrees."

He said other possibilities, such as a wet mudflat, could not be ruled out.

But assuming these were indeed waves, Dr Barnes calculates that a wind speed of around 0.75 m/s is required to produce ripples with the requisite slope of six degrees.

That points to the waves being just 2cm high. "Don't make your surfing vacation reservations for Titan just yet," Dr Barnes quipped.

However, Titan appears to be on the brink of major seasonal changes, which present important opportunities for scientists to gain a better understanding of this complex and endlessly surprising world.

"The expectation is that any day now, the winds will start getting strong enough as we move into northern summer, and the waves will start picking up," Ralph Lorenz, from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) in Maryland, told BBC News.

"You can also get a phenomenon known as wind set-up, where wind over a body of water will cause the liquid to pile up, potentially causing a storm surge."

He added: "A metre of storm surge, a metre of tides, is certainly within the realms of possibility for Titan. Whether we can see that [with Cassini] is another matter."

Dr Lorenz said he was hopeful that sea level rise of a metre in height could cause shorelines to migrate and that this could be picked up from orbit.

Titan operates on a 30-year seasonal cycle, with the northern region currently approaching summer solstice, which it will mark in 2017.

Titan's lakes
Titan's lakes and seas are concentrated at the saturnian moon's north pole
Computer models of Titan's weather suggest that the northern summer is approaching the rainy season, in which liquid hydrocarbons are "pumped" from the south pole to the north by the climate cycle.

Sometime soon, scientists expect, clouds will start to gather at the north pole and it should start to rain.

"We have a long-term picture of liquid levels rising in the north and declining in the south. But that's against the backdrop of seeing what we think are evaporite deposits around the northern seas and lakes," Dr Lorenz explained.

These evaporite regions are Titan's equivalent to salt flats on Earth where bodies of water evaporate, leaving behind minerals that had previously been dissolved in the water.

"That suggests that while the sea level is rising in the current epoch, at some time in the past, the liquid level was much higher than it is today. We've now mapped most of the surface and there aren't large areas where you could hide another sea," he explained.

The amount of moisture in the climate system might fluctuate because methane is continuously destroyed in the atmosphere by sunlight. But scientists think it could also be re-supplied via volcanic belches from beneath the moon's surface.

'Tidal roar'

In his own presentation at the LPSC, Dr Lorenz focused on a narrow "throat" feature that separates the two main basins of Titan's largest sea, Kraken Mare.

Dubbing it the "Throat of Kraken", he said it was similar in size to the Straits of Gibraltar and might generate fast-moving tidal currents through the narrow channel.

Dr Lorenz pointed out that on Earth, such circumstances can produce whirlpools, and in the case of the Corryvreckan off the coast of Scotland, a tidal maelstrom generates a roar that can be heard 16km away. Whether such phenomena existed at this location on Titan was pure speculation, he said.

Dr Lorenz explained: "It's really getting quite exciting, because we're starting to get a literal big picture, in the sense that the radar coverage [of Titan's surface] is close to complete. But because we're moving into northern summer, there's better lighting, which means the camera and the near-infrared spectrometer on Cassini are also able to map the northern seas."

"Everything is really starting to come together, and the seas and lakes are very much becoming the central topic in Titan science."

[Downs]

Sounds like it's time to invade Titan :P

[Strychnine]

Five Things You Should Never Do With a Particle Accelerator

What Happens When You Stick Your Head Into a Particle Accelerator


Today I found out what happens when you stick your head into a particle accelerator.

Exhibit A: Anatoli Petrovich Bugorski, a Russian scientist who has the distinction of being the only person to ever stick his head in a running particle accelerator. Shockingly, he also managed to survive the ordeal and, all things considered, came out without too much damage.

Bugorski was a researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, working with the Soviet particle accelerator: The Synchrotron U-70.

On July 13, 1978, Bugorski was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment. As he was leaning over the piece of equipment, he stuck his head through the part of the accelerator that the proton beam was running through. He reported seeing a flash that was “brighter than a thousand suns”, but did not feel any pain when this happened.

The beam itself measured 2000 gray as it entered Bugorski’s skull and about 3000 gray when it exited on the other side. A “gray” is an SI unit of energy absorbed from ionizing radiation. One gray is equal to the absorption of one joule of radiation energy by one kilogram of matter. An example where this is commonly used is in X-rays. For reference, absorption of over 5 grays at any time usually leads to death within 14 days. However, no one before had ever experienced radiation in the form of a proton beam moving at about the speed of light.





As you can see from the picture, the beam entered the back of Bugorski’s head and came out around his nose. Shortly after this happened, Bugorski’s left half of his face swelled up beyond recognition. He was taken to the hospital and studied as this was something that had never been seen before and so they closely monitored him thereafter, fully expecting him to die within a few days at most.

Although the skin on the part of his face and back of his head where the beam hit peeled off over the next few days and the beam had burned through his skull and brain tissue, Bugorski did not die and actually came through it all surprisingly well.

Despite the beam going through his brain, his intellectual capacity remained the same as before. The few negative health drawbacks he did experience were not life threatening either. He lost the hearing in his left ear and experienced a constant unpleasant noise in that ear from then on. The left half of his face slowly became paralyzed over the course of the next two years. He also gets significantly more fatigued with mental work, though he did go on to get his PhD after this incident. The remaining side effects were occasional absence seizures and later tonic-clonic seizures, though these didn’t show up right away.





The most bizarre side effect that occurred because of this has to do with his face. Looking at Bugorski now, you’d see the right half of his face looks like a normal wrinkled old man, but the left half of his face looks as if it was frozen in time 19 years ago. Apparently Botox’s got nothing on a particle accelerator’s proton beam for stopping wrinkles.

Now that was much much less energy than a collider like LHC. Here's what might happen at the LHC:

Here's an actual explanation, based on my (imperfect) knowledge as a physicist, rather than the Bugorski anecdote.

Let's take the latter case, where a full sized human stands in at the interaction point at the LHC. First, the beam is made up of ~3,000 packets of 1e11 protons, each with an energy of 7TeV, so the total energy stored in the beam is 30001e117 TeV = 2e15 TeV. This is 1/4 the energy of a lightning bolt (thanks WolframAlpha), [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightn...he_body](which you can easily survive). Once you absorb the beam, that's it - the beam isn't continuously replenished. Probably in less than a second.

Next, what kind of physical damage will this cause? We have 3e14 beam protons hitting and destroying 3e14 protons in your body. 3e14 protons isn't actually that much, spread out over the ~1cm2 beam area. That's not a lot - it probably wouldn't even damage a sheet of paper. That said, this is going to kill a lot of the cells in that 1cm area.

The real damage comes will come from the debris of the broken protons. Protons are made of quarks and gluons ("partons"). When you smash them, these partons are scattered. But as they go flying off, they create more and more partons which form a shower of particles. As this shower of high energy decay products goes ripping through your body, they'll ionize dna and leave a trail of radioactive atoms. That's the real source of damage - possibly some cancer.

[Strychnine]

And just for fun, here's another take on what might happen if "your friend" jumped in:

The diameter of the beam guide in the LHC is about 6 cm, so the first thing that would happen to them is they would be crushed. There are many possible 'paths' to take in answering your question, so I'm going to assume for the sake of argument in a chain that each event doesn't happen so that we can get as much meaningful information as possible:

Your friend enters the beam guide in the LHC:

1. She passes out. The interior of the LHC's beam path is a high vacuum (to prevent particles interacting with air, which decelerates them, destabilizes the beam, increases the number of errant particles that can damage the machine itself by running into it, and increases the amount of radiation produced by operating the machine); your friend would lose consciousness from decompression almost instantly.

2. Failing that, your friend would freeze to death. The LHC is kept at a temperature of about 4 K (-269 deg C) to cool its superconducting magnets that guide and focus the proton beam. Exposure to such cold temperatures would very rapidly be fatal to any unprotected living person.

3. Failing that, your friend would be subject to extreme magnetic forces. I hope she isn't wearing any metal or have surgical metal implanted into her, because it just became a projectile moving with a massive force towards the top of the beam path.

4. Failing that, your friend would be cooked alive by the intense RF environment inside the LHC. The LHC uses 400 MHz RF waves to accelerate particles; this just so happens to be the natural resonant frequency of the human head. Your friend's brain would be quickly destroyed (proteins denatured, then burned) by the intense RF energy.

5. Failing that, your friend would be irradiated by extremely intense synchrotron radiation. The protons in the LHC fill RF "buckets" - these are electromagnetic structures inside the beam path that carry protons. The protons inside a bucket are called a bunch. These bunches move around the entire circumference of the LHC about 100,000 times a second (ie, at the speed of light). Because the protons are charged particles, when they are accelerated by the circular motion of the RF bucket, they throw off photons in a cone ahead of and behind them. This cone is phenomenally intense radiation - visible light, UV and gamma. Assuming full body exposure (remember, we scaled up the accelerator to the size of your friend), she would probably die from exposure.

6. Failing that, she would be killed by the intense proton flux. As the bunch of protons passed through her body, they would deposit their energy destroying cells in her body. Because a human body is (relatively) dense and has a large volume, a pretty large number of the protons would interact, wrecking not just her DNA (a long term problem) but also destroying cellular structures (killing millions upon millions of cells). These protons are moving with so much energy that when they hit a cell, they create a massive shower of particles that will spread the damage (and the showered particles, when they collide with molecules in cells, will create an additional shower of particles). Your friend would probably not experience very much pain, but given the energy, the density of the beam, and the number of bunches she would encounter, I'm fairly certain she would not remain conscious under the barrage of protons for more than a second. The good news is, there are at maximum a second's worth of protons in the LHC so if she survives to second number two she's golden.

7. Failing that, your friend would due from radiation exposure. Much of the equipment in the LHC will become radioactive over time due to exposure to the proton flux. Depending on where specifically she was in the beam path, If your friend remained in the presence of the machine for long enough, she would ultimately develop cancer and other radiologically-induced diseases.

8. Failing that, your friend would survive!

[Strychnine]

cont.

What about acceleration?

The question that's been posed to me on several occasions is this: can you accelerate an object (let's say, your friend). The short answer is no, but I'll give you a similar runthrough here:

If your friend were inserted into the LHC (or more appropriately, it's injection system) and subjected to the same accelerating conditions, what would happen?

1. Nothing. Because the atoms inside a human body are electrically neutral, the electric fields used to accelerate particles don't have an effect on them.

2. So let's say they're not neutral? Well, understand that their neutrality (aka, the presence of electrons) is what allows them to form chemical bonds. So we need to "ionize" your friend, first. That means subjecting her to massive amounts of energy that will liberate the electrons. Understand that, because a living thing arises from a series of chemical processes (and chemistry is fundamentally dependent on valence interactions, ie, the presence of electrons around atoms) that this would basically be the end of your friend as we knew her. Her body would be destroyed by the ionizing RF fields. I'm not entirely sure what this would look like frankly, other than to say that afterwords you would need a mop.

3. So we ionize your friend. Her disembodied consciousness survives, and is equipped with a radio so as to allow her to continue to report her observations (wirelessly, of course). She would observe the RF energy as an intense burning sensation. The RF would raise the kinetic energy of the atoms in her body, and rapidly the sensation would be like being exposed to the most intense heat ever experienced. No human being will have ever been exposed to such an intense heat, and it would be absolutely agonizing (if your friends sensory processes could survive the initial stages).
4. Let's say the heat doesn't kill her. Your friend is now ionized. Her atoms would be suspended by the electric field inside the accelerator - she would appear to 'hover' in mid air (well, vacuum).

5. A positive electric field would be introduced, and your friend would start to move out of the ionization cavity we created to ionize her, and into the accelerator's beam line. As this happened, her atoms would begin to separate into bunches. The 'front' of your friend would become filled with Hydrogen, and towards the back her small amounts of heavy metals would cluster. It would be interested to see the globs of pure atoms that would separate out - each responding to the electric field in accordance with its inertia. Her atoms would coast along gently, until:

6. Your friend would be subjected to an accelerating EM wave. She would experience a "kick" akin to being shoved. Her atoms, separated loosely into bunches by mass, would be spread out even further and more clearly into those groups. As she travelled through the accelerator, she would experience periodic "kicks" (these would be quite violent, there's nothing 'smooth' about moving through an accelerator).

7. As she is travelling along, she would come under the influence of huge sector dipoles. These are massive (meters long) magnets that gradually use the Lorentz Force to gently bend the path of the particles into a curved path.

8. She'd be accelerated again, but this time, because of her relative velocity (now rapidly approaching the speed of light) the kick would be even sharper - and she'd begin to spread out. She'd notice that atoms close to the center of her body would accelerated very sharply, and those in her extremities (both radially (arms and legs) and along her polar axis (head and feet)) would not be accelerated as effectively - some of them not at all. Your friend would notice she is losing particles and becoming more spread out. Her Hydrogen atoms (because we're in the LHC) would zip right along. Some of her other constituent atoms may behave similarly, but for the most part pretty rapidly your friend would be a cloud of Hydrogen atoms, her other parts crashing into the walls of the accelerator because they aren't moving at the right speed to get the "kick" from the oscillating electric field (some would actually be decelerated by the EM wave).

9. Your friend, scattered somewhat because of her wide spread across the beam path, now undergoes focusing. She passes through a series of focusing systems which, rather than the large, constant magnetic field of the sector dipole, vary with her radial position in the beam path. The farther from the center, the harder the 'kick' her atoms receive (and the ones at the center receive none at all). She also notices, quite unexpectedly, that the focusing system has given her a rather pleasant "spin" as her atoms orbit around the center of the beam path. She begins to 'corkscrew' through the accelerator.

10.This process repeats itself over and over, pushing her speed closer and closer to that of light. As this happens, time begins to slow down for your friend. The kicks begin to space out in time - when initially she'd experiences hundreds of kicks per second, now they're coming hours apart. Her spiraling slows down dramatically into a languid turning that she barely notices.

11.Something happens. Your friend feels a violent "kick" as she passes through a new type of magnet - she's been pushed out of the accelerating ring and into a transport beam. The nice, harmonic circular motion of her atoms is disrupted by the kick. She races towards the black steel wall directly ahead of her, and moments before her disasterous radioactive impact, a second magnet slams her in the opposite direction, guiding her into the beam path. The effect of the transition is violence and persistent - aftershocks of motion pass through her atoms in waves as they continue on their free path unabated. The process continues - accelerate, guide, focus, accelerate, guide focus. She's moving quite fast now, and finds that time is moving phenomenally slowly - almost at a standstill.

12. She's looping around the accelerator now, chugging along merrily. Your friend occupies an "RF" bucket and at this point most of the tumultuous motion in her atoms from the injection system have been damped out. She's lost much of her mass to the machine's powerful electromagnetic systems and the cruel mistress of dynamics (Newton's laws still apply), but for the most part her motion is nice and harmonious. Then, she notices a large, bright region ahead.

13.She experiences another kick. Not as large as the ones before, but she knows something strange is happening. As soon as she feels it, perspective shifts rapidly and she's starting into the brightest, most intense and powerful light anyone or anything has ever experienced. She only has a moment to consider that soon she will be part of it until she enters the bright region.

14.Her atoms enter a region that is densely populated (for accelerator terms) with other protons - except these are travelling in the opposite direction. She feels herself slam into them at unheard, impossible energies. The very fabric of the universe changes in the resulting environment. The kinetic energy she has been given, confined to such a small space, isn't able to escape and instead the glue that holds her constituents together comes undone. It's an entirely knew experience - despite being accelerated to the speed of light, and having energy piled on top of it, nothing came close to touching the strength of that glue - but now it is undone, and she expands, gloriously into a beautiful pool of light. She's never felt anything like it - it's indescribable - but not to last.

15.Time returns to normal, and your friend notices that she is giving birth to entirely new particles - particles she's never even seen or heard of. They rocket out of her, trailing a shower of particles as if just the effort of their creation offends the laws of physics. She watches as these particles travel for mere seconds, and then in a flash are destroyed, collapsing into new particles in a chain of events she can't even begin to understand or follow. It's happening all around her, continuously. Mostly the particles appear mundane, but every so often a massive one pops out, sapping her of a great deal of energy, and she watches it travel just a fraction of a second before it decays into a shower of its own particles. The sensation is remarkably akin to giving birth, and she is overcome by a sense of warmth and compassion for her daughter particles. It's beautiful, and she wishes it would go on for ever - but gradually, as time goes on, your friend feels her energy fade and she knows that the time of light is done. Though the energy expenditure was great, only a tiny fraction of her constituent atoms were consumed by the light, and she moves on in the accelerator.

16.Your friend continues to cycle in the accelerator. She begins to bore of it after a time. Kick, push, twist, pull, kick. Over and over again. It's interesting, but she longs for the light and is excited when she sees another large kicker magnet approaching.

17.She edges her consciousness forward in her bunch - eagerly anticipating the painful kick to see what is on the other side of it. It happens. BAM she is forced out of the accelerator path again, but this time she does not see the glorious plasmic light - but instead a flat concrete wall. She careens towards it and has only time to note a series of bright flashes as bunches ahead of her collide with it before she too smashes into the concrete. Her atoms collide with nuclei in the concrete, embedding her in it in a shower of radioactive particles, and she is still, joined with the man-made stone. And she is at rest.

[90GT50]

So, I kinda want to see someone put in a particle accelerator now.