Supersymmetric Particle Found?

November 14th, 2018

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With the large hadron collider running out of places to look for clues to a deeper theory of physics, we need a bigger particle accelerator. We have one – the galaxy.

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Physics is currently in a weird place. Historically, no matter how crazy our theories got, there were always new ways to test them. Your theory predicts a new particle? Build a particle accelerator big enough to see it. But once your collider spans entire countries – like the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland – there’s only so much larger you can go – at least on the surface of the Earth. The LHC has thoroughly tested the standard model of particle physics. The last component of that model – the Higgs boson – was verified in 2013. But the standard model isn’t the end of the story – there MUST be a more fundamental theory that explains the origins of this rich family of particles. Proposals for such grand unified theories proliferate, unconstrained by even the tiniest hint of new physics from the LHC.

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Posted in Physics |

Why String Theory is Right

November 7th, 2018

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Some see string theory as the one great hope for a theory of everything – that it will unite quantum mechanics and gravity and so unify all of physics into one glorious theory.

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Why has string theory been the obsession of a generation of theoretical physicists? What exactly is so compelling about tiny, vibrating strings? In our last string theory episode I talked about what these things really are, and covered some history. In short: the strings of string theory are literal strands and loops that vibrate with standing waves. Simply by changing the vibrational mode you get different particles – analogous to how different vibrational modes on guitar strings gives different notes. And, by the way, strings exist in 6 compact spatial dimensions on top of the familiar 3.

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Posted in Physics |

Drinking in ZERO-G! (and other challenges of a trip to Mars)

November 2nd, 2018

A trip to #Mars involves radiation, muscle and bone loss, intermediate axis theorem and liquids.
Check out Mars on National Geographic, Monday Nov 12 at 9/8c
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When I got offered the chance to fly in another #zeroG plane, I jumped at the chance. Do you know how hard it is when you are thrust into low-gravity, like the 37% of Earth’s gravity of Mars, and you have to remember what you were going to say in a 30 second window as blood floods your head? It’s pretty hard. It would be even harder to actually travel to Mars. It would take about 8 months in microgravity during which time your muscles and bones would weaken substantially, even if you exercise for hours a day like the astronauts on the space station. And your heart is a muscle too so it weakens as well. Before I contemplated these rates of muscle and bone loss, I thought the major challenge with a round trip journey to Mars would be the logistics of spacecraft and having enough fuel to get back. But with the weakening of the human body, it’s an open question whether anyone would really want to come back.

Filmed by Steve Boxall

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Are Virtual Particles A New Layer of Reality?

October 31st, 2018

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Let me tell you a story about virtual particles. It may or may not be true.

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Sometimes our mathematical hacks point to strange new aspects of reality. For example Max Planck used a quantization trick to figure out the spectrum of light emitted by hot objects. The quantization part of his math trick was meant to disappear in the final form of equation, but it remained – it proved fundamental. That math hack turned out to represent the very real quantum nature of the photon. This insight let to the discovery of all quantum physics. A more recent mathematical hack is the virtual particle. They started out as a trick to make impossible calculations in quantum field theory possible. Possible, at least, for the sort of people who can do quantum field theory. So will virtual particles also prove to represent a new underlying aspect of reality? We’re going to go pretty deep in this one – but it will bring us to a better understanding of the quantum nature of reality, so stick with me.

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Posted in Physics |

Will We Ever Find Alien Life?

October 25th, 2018

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The silence of the galaxy and the resulting Fermi Paradox has perplexed us for nearly 50 years. But our most recent surveys of the Milky Way finally allow us to draw scientific conclusions about the depressingly persistent absence of aliens.

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When Enrico Fermi uttered the words, “Where is everybody?” he was succinctly summarizing what has become known as the Fermi paradox. In short: in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars, each of which having billions of years to spawn life and civilization, isn’t it odd that none have made themselves apparent to us. Enrico Fermi was, supposedly, using this as an argument against the plausibility of interstellar travel. If aliens can travel between the stars, why haven’t they visited? But the paradox is much broader than this. There are several ways that an advanced civilization could give away their presence. Radio transmissions, robotic probes, or star-blotting solar arrays. A series of very recent surveys of our galaxy reveal none of the above, while at the same time proving the abundance of potentially habitable worlds. The Fermi paradox has become only more paradoxical, and these surveys are finally powerful enough to draw some serious conclusions about the rarity of advanced civilizations AND about the chance of us ever becoming one.

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Posted in Physics |

What Actually Causes Dandruff?

October 24th, 2018

This fungus lives on your scalp and may affect the genes you express.
Check out Head & Shoulders research on getting rid of dandruff: https://ve42.co/HS

Animation by Pindex: https://ve42.co/pindex

When I started this project, I wasn’t sure what caused dandruff and I also didn’t think much science would go into making a shampoo like Head & Shoulders. So what I learned really surprised me:

There are hundreds of scientists working on this shampoo. They run crazy-sounding experiments like hanging hair near Tokyo highways to understand how real-world environments deposit dirt on hair. They use sophisticated scientific techniques like electron microscopes, nuclear magnetic resonance and gene sequencing to study dandruff on the molecular level.

In fact they sequenced the entire genome of Malassezia globosa in 2002, one year after the human genome project. Their findings are published in international refereed journals. What they have found is that the Malassezia fungi create free fatty acids as byproducts of their digestion, which for some people create irritation and lead to hyper-proliferation of skin cells, flaking, histamines, inflammatory cytokines, and blood proteins reaching the surface of the skin. These findings indicate the unhealthiness of dandruff scalp and suggest a possible remedy – controlling the metabolism of the Malassezia fungi. This is achieved using different active ingredients in different products and different parts of the world, including zinc pyrithione, selenium sulfide, and piroctone olamine. With the reduction of irritants, the scalp actually expresses different genes, producing a signature more similar to a non-dandruff baseline scalp.

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What are the Strings in String Theory?

October 18th, 2018

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Why strings? What are they made of? How did physicists even come up with this bizarre idea? And what’s all this nonsense of extra dimensions?

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In physics we like to reduce down our description of the mechanics of reality to the simplest possible form. We expect the most fundamental machinery to have the fewest possible moving parts – or free parameters. This is why the standard model of particle physics is considered incomplete. Its equations predict many things with stunning accuracy, but they first require us to tune many mathematical knobs and dials. We need to use physical measurement to fix 19 free parameters like the masses of particles. And then there’s gravity, which doesn’t fit into the standard model at all. So surely there exists a deeper set of cogs and wheels – a theory that brings all observable phenomena into the same mechanical framework. That would be a theory of everything, and this is the great hope of string theory.

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Posted in Physics |

Computing a Universe Simulation

October 10th, 2018

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Physics seems to be telling us that it’s possible to simulate the entire universe on a computer smaller than the universe.

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I’m not saying the universe is a simulation. I mean it might be – I’m just not saying it. And perhaps it doesn’t make any difference. Even if this is the prime, the original physical universe, rather than somewhere deep in a simulation nest, we can STILL think of our universe’s underlying mechanics as computation. Imagine a universe in which the most elementary components are stripped of all properties besides some binary notion of existence or non-existence. Like, if the tiniest chunks of spacetime, or chunks of quantum fields, or elements in the abstract space of quantum-mechanical states can either be full or empty. These elements interact with their neighbors by a simple set of rules, leading to oscillations, elementary particles, atoms, and ultimately to all of the emergent laws of physics, physical structure, and ultimately the universe.

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Posted in Physics |

How to Detect Extra Dimensions

October 3rd, 2018

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On this Space Time Journal Club we look at how gravitational waves can be used to search for extra dimensions of space!
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“Limits on the number of spacetime dimensions from GW170817”
Pardo, Fishbach, Holz & Spergel 2018
https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.08160

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Why Boredom is Good For You

September 29th, 2018

Boredom makes you more creative, altruistic, introspective, and helps with autobiographical planning.
This video was sponsored by LastPass: http://bit.ly/2wAsdUu

I feel like this video might come across as condescending but the person I’m really talking to is myself. Despite the fact that I know how useful it can be to be bored, I still find myself trying to fill every last moment with stimulus. Boredom is unpleasant – the open, unstructured thinking that can take place can also feel pointless. But now I’m made this video to remind myself how important boredom is so hopefully I’ll make more time to be bored.

More resources:

The boredom leads people to shock themselves study:
Just Think: The challenges of the disengaged mind
https://wjh-www.harvard.edu/~dtg/WILSONETAL2014.pdf

Boredom leads people to consider their future and set goals study:
Back to the future: Autobiographical planning and the functionality of mind-wandering
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810011001978

On boredom and altruism:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ca72/0f959d3c9c31187ac30b28ecfec430bc98cc.pdf

Does boredom make us more creative?
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10400419.2014.901073

Amazing filming by Raquel Nuno

Music from http://epidemicsound.com “I Think I Was There” “Critical Thinking 2” “Wide Open” “Seaweed” “A Sound Foundation 1”

Music also by Kevin MacLeod http://incompetech.com “Fig Leaf Rag”

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