Physics anyone?

[Phigure]

yeah, and it actually doesn't "disappear" from the sheet, since mass is conserved in a black hole

[alphacat]

But it does disappear from the side of the sheet where you can directly observe it.

SHEETPHASE. lol.

[SignalRecon]

Yeah pretty much, it's just a rough visual representation in terms of a single, 2 dimensional plane

This is probably a better one

This makes much more sense to me, I can't help but feel like this is closer to what is actually happening.

[kay]

But it does disappear from the side of the sheet where you can directly observe it.

SHEETPHASE. lol.

It doesn't disappear as we can still measure/infer the mass of the black hole. As for being unable to directly observe it, perhaps it is because we do not have the capability to describe what goes on inside the black hole that we do not yet have the techniques/knowledge to interrogate the contents of the black hole.

[hugh]

we could only do that if we managed to create something that is unbound by space and time. Seems pretty unlikely that technology like that will be available in the next several hundred years, if ever at all.

[kay]

True. But the fundamental physics of the universe should not be bounded by human limitations on perception and mathematics. No one would come up with new paradigms for viewing the structure of the universe/reality if we keep telling ourselves that there is no way to rephrase physics as we know it to avoid the singularities that describe black holes.

[alphacat]

Mysterious energy discovered in thunderclouds



ORLANDO, Fla. — Central Floridians are no strangers to violent thunderstorms, living in the lightning capital of the country.

But now scientists have discovered an exotic and dynamic form of energy lurking in the thunderclouds above: dark lightning.

Scientists at the Florida Institute of Technology on the Space Coast are traveling the world explaining the mysterious bursts of energy in the atmosphere during lightning storms that emit little visible light.

According to scientist Joseph Dwyer and his colleagues, space telescopes — looking for high-energy bursts from solar flares, black holes and exploding stars — detected strange, bright bursts but had no idea where they originated.

The phenomenon occurs high in the atmosphere at nearly the same altitude as commercial airline flights. The radiation dark lightning produces is about 100 times more potent than an X-ray.

“What’s kind of cool is that what we’re talking about sounds like science fiction — but this stuff is really happening inside thunderstorms,” said Dwyer, who spoke with the Orlando Sentinel from Vienna, where he presented his research at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union. “It’s happening right over our heads.”

Normal lightning occurs when clouds pregnant with positive and negative charges build up and create an electric field. When those charges separate, they discharge huge amounts of energy suddenly and cause a hot, bright, incandescent spark.

It’s like rubbing your feet on a rug and touching a metal doorknob. Zap!

Dark lightning is another kind of discharge humans can’t see. If our eyes were sensitive enough, we might see a bluish-purple glow emanating from the clouds.

An electric field emerges just as it does for lightning. But under the right conditions, dark lightning produces a kilometerwide explosion of electrons and their antimatter equivalent, positrons — the power source for starship Enterprise.

Those particles collide with air molecules at nearly the speed of light, shooting streams of gamma rays and radio waves into space.

If a plane is flying through a thunderstorm, dark lightning could produce radiation comparable to what a human receives during a full body CT scan or 10 chest X-rays.

It can be hazardous, but most pilots avoid thunderclouds at all costs. Dwyer says it’s not worth losing sleep over: The likelihood of getting a dosage of dark lightning radiation is low.

“This is not a reason to avoid flying,” Dwyer said.

Dark lightning is less frequent but more powerful than regular lightning.

The continuous collisions of positrons, electrons and air molecules emitting gamma rays mean thunderstorms act like natural particle accelerators.

Scientists use particle accelerators in their research to create electromagnetic fields to find answers to basic questions about the structure and origins of the universe. An older television’s cathode-ray tube — which enables you to see images on the monitor — is an example of one.

Because scientists have only begun to understand the phenomenon, there is still a lot they don’t know.

Most of the dark lightning has been spotted in the tall storm clouds of the tropics — but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening frequently in Central Florida.

The region is a nucleus of bolt activity because it sits in the center of a long, narrow peninsula with warm water on either side. Easterly and westerly sea breezes collide to create powerful storms.

With more research, the Orlando metropolis could turn out to be a major hub of dark lightning energy.

[kay]

Calling it dark lightning seems a bit alarmist.

[alphacat]

Unfortunately scientists have taken to coining sexy names in the hopes of procuring funding, more often than not. I mean, who'd want to research "aphotic lightning?"

[SignalRecon]

Unfortunately scientists have taken to coining sexy names in the hopes of procuring funding, more often than not. I mean, who'd want to research "aphotic lightning?"

LOL


P.s still a good read. Thx for the post!

[alphacat]

‘Time Crystals’ Could Upend Physicists’ Theory of Time


Physicists plan to create a “time crystal” — a theoretical object that moves in a repeating pattern without using energy — inside a device called an ion trap. Image: Hartmut Häffner

In February 2012, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek decided to go public with a strange and, he worried, somewhat embarrassing idea. Impossible as it seemed, Wilczek had developed an apparent proof of “time crystals” — physical structures that move in a repeating pattern, like minute hands rounding clocks, without expending energy or ever winding down. Unlike clocks or any other known objects, time crystals derive their movement not from stored energy but from a break in the symmetry of time, enabling a special form of perpetual motion.

“Most research in physics is continuations of things that have gone before,” said Wilczek, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This, he said, was “kind of outside the box.”

Wilczek’s idea met with a muted response from physicists. Here was a brilliant professor known for developing exotic theories that later entered the mainstream, including the existence of particles called axions and anyons, and discovering a property of nuclear forces known as asymptotic freedom (for which he shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 2004). But perpetual motion, deemed impossible by the fundamental laws of physics, was hard to swallow. Did the work constitute a major breakthrough or faulty logic? Jakub Zakrzewski, a professor of physics and head of atomic optics at Jagiellonian University in Poland who wrote a perspective on the research that accompanied Wilczek’s publication, says: “I simply don’t know.”

Now, a technological advance has made it possible for physicists to test the idea. They plan to build a time crystal, not in the hope that this perpetuum mobile will generate an endless supply of energy (as inventors have striven in vain to do for more than a thousand years) but that it will yield a better theory of time itself.

A Crazy Concept

The idea came to Wilczek while he was preparing a class lecture in 2010. “I was thinking about the classification of crystals, and then it just occurred to me that it’s natural to think about space and time together,” he said. “So if you think about crystals in space, it’s very natural also to think about the classification of crystalline behavior in time.”

When matter crystallizes, its atoms spontaneously organize themselves into the rows, columns and stacks of a three-dimensional lattice. An atom occupies each “lattice point,” but the balance of forces between the atoms prevents them from inhabiting the space between. Because the atoms suddenly have a discrete, rather than continuous, set of choices for where to exist, crystals are said to break the spatial symmetry of nature — the usual rule that all places in space are equivalent. But what about the temporal symmetry of nature — the rule that stable objects stay the same throughout time?


The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek often develops outlandish theories that eventually enter the mainstream. “Of course not everything I do works,” he says. Image: Frank Wilczek

Wilczek mulled over the possibility for months. Eventually, his equations indicated that atoms could indeed form a regularly repeating lattice in time, returning to their initial arrangement only after discrete (rather than continuous) intervals, thereby breaking time symmetry. Without consuming or producing energy, time crystals would be stable, in what physicists call their “ground state,” despite cyclical variations in structure that scientists say can be interpreted as perpetual motion.

“For a physicist, this is really a crazy concept to think of a ground state which is time-dependent,” said Hartmut Häffner, a quantum physicist at the University of California at Berkeley. “The definition of a ground state is that this is energy-zero. But if the state is time-dependent, that implies that the energy changes or something is changing. Something is moving around.”

How can something move, and keep moving forever, without expending energy? It seemed an absurd idea — a major break from the accepted laws of physics. But Wilczek’s papers on quantum and classical time crystals (the latter co-authored by Alfred Shapere of the University of Kentucky) survived a panel of expert reviewers and were published in Physical Review Letters in October 2012. Wilczek didn’t claim to know whether objects that break the symmetry of time exist in nature, but he wanted experimentalists to try to make one.

“It’s like you draw targets and wait for arrows to hit them,” he said. “If there’s no logical barrier to this behavior being realized, then I expect it will be realized.”

The Big Test

In June, a group of physicists led by Xiang Zhang, a nanoengineer at Berkeley, and Tongcang Li, a physicist and postdoctoral researcher in Zhang’s group, proposed creating a time crystal in the form of a persistently rotating ring of charged atoms, or ions. (Li said he had been contemplating the idea before reading Wilczek’s papers.) The group’s article was published with Wilczek’s in Physical Review Letters.

Since then, a single critic — Patrick Bruno, a theoretical physicist at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France — has voiced dissent in the academic literature. Bruno thinks Wilczek and company mistakenly identified time-dependent behavior of objects in excited energetic states, rather than their ground states. There is nothing surprising about objects with surplus energy moving in a cyclical fashion, with the motion decaying as the energy dissipates. To be a time crystal, an object must exhibit perpetual motion in its ground state.

Bruno’s comment and Wilczek’s reply appeared in Physical Review Letters in March 2013. Bruno demonstrated that a lower energy state is possible in a model system that Wilczek had proposed as a hypothetical example of a quantum time crystal. Wilczek said that although the example is not a time crystal, he doesn’t think the error “calls into question the basic concepts.”

“I proved that example is not correct,” Bruno said. “But I have no general proof — so far, at least.”


The debate will probably not be settled on theoretical grounds. “The ball is really in the hands of our very clever experimental colleagues,” Zakrzewski said.

An international team led by Berkeley scientists is preparing an elaborate lab experiment, although it may take “anywhere between three and infinity years” to complete, depending on funding or unforeseen technical difficulties, said Häffner, who is co-principal investigator with Zhang. The hope is that time crystals will push physics beyond the precise but seemingly imperfect laws of quantum mechanics and lead the way to a grander theory.

“I’m very interested in seeing if I can make a new contribution following Einstein,” Li said. “He said that quantum mechanics is not complete.”

To Build an Ion Ring

In Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity (the body of laws governing gravity and the large-scale structure of the universe), the dimensions of time and space are woven together into the same fabric, known as space-time. But in quantum mechanics (the laws governing interactions on the subatomic scale), the time dimension is represented in a different way than the three dimensions of space — “a disturbing, aesthetically unpleasant asymmetry,” Zakrzewski said.

The different treatments of time may be one source of incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics, at least one of which must be altered for there to be an all-encompassing theory of quantum gravity (widely viewed as a major goal of theoretical physics). Which concept of time is right?

If time crystals are able to break time symmetry in the same way that conventional crystals break space symmetry, “it tells you that in nature those two quantities seem to have similar properties, and that ultimately should reflect itself in a theory,” Häffner said. This would suggest that quantum mechanics is inadequate, and that a better quantum theory might treat time and space as two threads of the same fabric.


An illustration of the time crystal experiment planned at UC-Berkeley. Electric fields will be used to corral calcium ions into a 100-micron-wide “trap,”
where they will form a crystalline ring. The scientists believe a static magnetic field will cause the ring to rotate. Image: Hartmut Häffner

The Berkeley-led team will attempt to build a time crystal by injecting 100 calcium ions into a small chamber surrounded by electrodes. The electric field generated by the electrodes will corral the ions in a “trap” 100 microns wide, or roughly the width of a human hair. The scientists must precisely calibrate the electrodes to smooth out the field. Because like charges repel, the ions will space themselves evenly around the outer edge of the trap, forming a crystalline ring.

At first, the ions will vibrate in an excited state, but diode lasers like those found in DVD players will be used to gradually scatter away their extra kinetic energy. According to the group’s calculations, the ion ring should settle into its ground state when the ions are laser-cooled to around one-billionth of a degree above absolute zero. Access to this temperature regime had long been obstructed by background heat emanating from trap electrodes, but in September, a breakthrough technique for cleaning surface contaminants off electrodes enabled a 100-fold reduction in ion trap background heat. “That’s exactly the factor we need to bring this experiment into reach,” Häffner said.

Next, the researchers will switch on a static magnetic field in the trap, which their theory says should induce the ions to start rotating (and continue doing so indefinitely). If all goes as planned, the ions will cycle around to their starting point at fixed intervals, forming a regularly repeating lattice in time that breaks temporal symmetry.

To see the ring’s rotation, the scientists will zap one of the ions with a laser, effectively tagging it by putting it into a different electronic state than the other 99 ions. It will stay bright (and reveal its new location) when the others are darkened by a second laser.

If the bright ion is circling the ring at a steady rate, then the scientists will have demonstrated, for the first time, that the translational symmetry of time can be broken. “It will really challenge our understanding,” Li said. “But first we need to prove that it does indeed exist.”

Until that happens, some physicists will remain deeply skeptical. “I personally think it’s not possible to detect motion in the ground state,” Bruno said. “They may be able to make a ring of ions in a toroidal trap and do some interesting physics with that, but they will not see their ever-ticking clock as they claim.”

In b4 anyone says anything about ultimate MIDI timeclock.

[kay]

It would be nice to move beyond quantum mechanics.

[inDistinkt]

This is a great thread. One thing I've thought about from time to time is spinning macroscopic objects. Even though the object itself is moving, it appears to not move through space. Yet the individual particles are moving through space in an orbital motion. I do read a decent amount on physics but Im still a laymen, so it's hard for me to put my thoughts into words, and my knowledge is limited, but...

I was thinking about what would happen if you were to spin an object so fast that relativistic effects started to occur. Imagine a transparent sphere with a family inside, eating dinner at a table. If the sphere was spun so fast that the individual atoms experienced time dilation and moved slower through time, eventually the sphere should appear to spin slower to an outside viewer. Would it eventually get to a point where the sphere appears to spin so slowly that someone could simply look in and observe the family eating in slow motion? How might the outside world look to the family inside ? This also makes me wonder how we can actually test how fast an object is spinning relative to someone standing still next to it. Maybe by measuring the intrinsic resonating frequencies of the atoms?

I know shapes of objects also change at such high speeds, so maybe if the object starts to compress, it would compensate for the time it takes to make a complete revolution ( the smaller appearing object would need less time to spin around). But I guess that also means the scene being viewed would be incomprehensible due to the distorted shape, even if you could watch it in slowed down time. I think

edit: This is all assuming the family inside is spinning with the sphere, but is able to carry on as if nothing is different, and somehow The table and everything else remains perfectly in place while spinning.

[hugh]

now my brain hurts

[alphacat]

Can entropy explain the rise of intelligence?

...can entropy explain the rise of Skynet and killer Terminator robots?

[kay]

This is a great thread. One thing I've thought about from time to time is spinning macroscopic objects. Even though the object itself is moving, it appears to not move through space. Yet the individual particles are moving through space in an orbital motion. I do read a decent amount on physics but Im still a laymen, so it's hard for me to put my thoughts into words, and my knowledge is limited, but...

I was thinking about what would happen if you were to spin an object so fast that relativistic effects started to occur. Imagine a transparent sphere with a family inside, eating dinner at a table. If the sphere was spun so fast that the individual atoms experienced time dilation and moved slower through time, eventually the sphere should appear to spin slower to an outside viewer. Would it eventually get to a point where the sphere appears to spin so slowly that someone could simply look in and observe the family eating in slow motion? How might the outside world look to the family inside ? This also makes me wonder how we can actually test how fast an object is spinning relative to someone standing still next to it. Maybe by measuring the intrinsic resonating frequencies of the atoms?

I know shapes of objects also change at such high speeds, so maybe if the object starts to compress, it would compensate for the time it takes to make a complete revolution ( the smaller appearing object would need less time to spin around). But I guess that also means the scene being viewed would be incomprehensible due to the distorted shape, even if you could watch it in slowed down time. I think

edit: This is all assuming the family inside is spinning with the sphere, but is able to carry on as if nothing is different, and somehow The table and everything else remains perfectly in place while spinning.

I could be wrong, but the spinning sphere (and its constituents) would experience time at a rate that progressed slower than the outside, but to the outside observer, its rate of spin would not change. If you could resolve the motion of the family sitting inside the sphere while it was spinning at relativistic speeds though, they probably would be moving slower. Assuming the family could look out and resolve the outside while spinning at relativistic speeds, they would see things moving quickly indeed, probably with a smearing of shapes to become larger and shifting of colours towards the lower frequencies of the EM spectrum (I think).

[EliteLennon117]

I love this thread, very thought provoking.

[rev]

It would be nice to move beyond quantum mechanics.

but how to get there...?

[alphacat]

^ You mean something like the Electric Universe theory?

http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/

[particle-jim]

Mysterious energy discovered in thunderclouds

I can confirm that I do regularly beam into space