The SRK Science Thread 2.0

[forte95]

I’ve been away from this thread for a while, but I found out about the gravitational waves news when it came out. It’s very interesting.

I especially like how they measured gravitational waves; they just used a Michelson interferometer, with “bead” particles as the prism/mirror. The findings regarding the black holes and black hole merger are new and exciting, but this technology means so much more than that.

For example, we may be able to get more information about dark matter interactions, because now we can look at gravitational effects without having to look for light.

[forte95]

I have a question: what is the proper reaction to experience phenomena that should entirely supernatural?

Document it!

[forte95]

Could Quantum Brain Effects Explain Consciousness?
snip

Interesting. I think there are two routes that have to be taken to investigate this further:

a. Theoretical/Mathematical route (spoilered for length and a bit of technicality):

[details=Spoiler]Check Penrose’s theory. My understanding is that what he’s saying is, “The human mind can solve problems that cannot be solved by a traditional computer, but may be solved by a quantum one.”

I don’t think quantum information theory is as fleshed out as classic information theory. They could flesh out a quantum completeness theorem: find out which problems are quantum-computer-solvable.

Then you could try to see if there exist human-solvable problems that are not quantum-computer-solvable.[/details]

b. Experimental route:

[details=Spoiler]Check if our neurons really CAN maintain quantum effects. What I understand from the article is that there are two quantum effects that Hameroff is asserting: tunneling between synaptic gaps and entangling two electrons to act as a quantum bit (qubit).

Tunneling between synaptic gaps is something even I imagine every once in a while. Our neurons would have to be really complex to pull this off properly, but I don’t think it’s impossible. You’d have to control the environment and monitor two processes:

1. How the electrons jump between synaptic gaps. It’s pretty easy to figure out if they’re tunneling; just see if the current follows modeled quantum tunneling currrent.
2. How the neurons manipulate the synapses and synaptic gaps. If the brain uses tunneling for computing, it must be controlling the tunneling somehow. This is going to be really hard; where would you start looking? Maybe the brain modulates the amount of neurotransmitters to vary the gap distance, or maybe the synapses themselves contract and expand to create a different tunneling geometry. There are a LOT of ways this can happen.

Entangling two electrons to act as a qubit would be even harder to test. I don’t think we have the technology to test this right now, because we can only identify entangled particles in a very controlled environment (such as firing beams of entangled photons at carefully designed crystals to redirect them toward 2 different sensors). It’d take forever to set that up inside a working neuron.[/details]

[WTF-AKUMA-HAX]

So is Pertho ghostbusta’ing

Or finding bigfoot feces…

[Jion_Wansu]

Can we confirm Planet X (tenth planet)

Yes Pluto is still the ninth planet to me!!!

[BullDancer]

@forte95 It is already an established fact that some of the body’s chemical pathways use quantum tunneling for some chemical processes. Our neurons using them would not surprise me.

[forte95]

That’s interesting, thanks. I’d like to read more about that.

Do you happen to know if it’s also established how the neurons control the tunneling? They’d need to do it precisely to quantum-compute properly, and I really have no idea if our neurons can handle that kind of precision.

[Pertho]

I have a question: what is the proper reaction to experience phenomena that should entirely supernatural?

Document it!

I don’t even know how to begin measuring it. The only problem is that the things remotely close to what happened to me are either conspiracy theory fodder or quackery.

[forte95]

You don’t have to think about proper scientific documentation right away.

Just document whatever you can, like the place, time of day, day of the year, a thorough description of what you saw/heard/felt, etc.

Describe the experience using simple words, and add in the finest details you can remember. Your memory of it may be vivid, but memories fade; you’ll want a good journal entry or something to fall back on.

The thing is, if the experience is over, you’re not gonna get any rigorous measurement from it anyway. So the best you can do is figure out what the situation was, what the circumstances were. Then if you’re really interested in scientifically documenting the experience, you should start working on recreating the results, and measure stuff from that recreated experience.

EDIT: Working on recreating the results doesn’t mean you want to recreate the ENTIRE experience. It means you want to focus on one detail (e.g. how exactly did I see what I saw?), come up with hypotheses, then test and measure.

[BullDancer]

That’s interesting, thanks. I’d like to read more about that.

Do you happen to know if it’s also established how the neurons control the tunneling? They’d need to do it precisely to quantum-compute properly, and I really have no idea if our neurons can handle that kind of precision.

It has not been established how neurons control tunneling although is probably via enzymatic complexes. The furthest extent of knowledge that most of anyone knows iirc A)Tunneling is established to be used in the electron transport chain. B ) A faulty complex involved in electron transport (most likely) contributes to neurodegenerative diseases.

The best visual that I recall seeing were electrons being moved through a gradient but they were ending up in random places and there is some enzymatic complex redirecting the elections to the correct place so they can actually do work. Something like that. Biology=My worst subject. I’ll see if I can find that visual though.

[white_shadow]

Could Quantum Brain Effects Explain Consciousness?
snip

Interesting. I think there are two routes that have to be taken to investigate this further:

a. Theoretical/Mathematical route (spoilered for length and a bit of technicality):

[details=Spoiler]Check Penrose’s theory. My understanding is that what he’s saying is, “The human mind can solve problems that cannot be solved by a traditional computer, but may be solved by a quantum one.”

I don’t think quantum information theory is as fleshed out as classic information theory. They could flesh out a quantum completeness theorem: find out which problems are quantum-computer-solvable.

Then you could try to see if there exist human-solvable problems that are not quantum-computer-solvable.[/details]

b. Experimental route:

[details=Spoiler]Check if our neurons really CAN maintain quantum effects. What I understand from the article is that there are two quantum effects that Hameroff is asserting: tunneling between synaptic gaps and entangling two electrons to act as a quantum bit (qubit).

Tunneling between synaptic gaps is something even I imagine every once in a while. Our neurons would have to be really complex to pull this off properly, but I don’t think it’s impossible. You’d have to control the environment and monitor two processes:

1. How the electrons jump between synaptic gaps. It’s pretty easy to figure out if they’re tunneling; just see if the current follows modeled quantum tunneling currrent.
2. How the neurons manipulate the synapses and synaptic gaps. If the brain uses tunneling for computing, it must be controlling the tunneling somehow. This is going to be really hard; where would you start looking? Maybe the brain modulates the amount of neurotransmitters to vary the gap distance, or maybe the synapses themselves contract and expand to create a different tunneling geometry. There are a LOT of ways this can happen.

Entangling two electrons to act as a qubit would be even harder to test. I don’t think we have the technology to test this right now, because we can only identify entangled particles in a very controlled environment (such as firing beams of entangled photons at carefully designed crystals to redirect them toward 2 different sensors). It’d take forever to set that up inside a working neuron.[/details]

I finally have time to make a coherent post.

Option A seems the most feasible since the technology will certainly advance, but with option B there are biological precedents like its aforementioned use by birds for navigation via entangled electrons, which could offer clues as to how microtubules could create a quantum conducive state:

https://youtu.be/jepgOQEvWT0

Although brain cells and photoreceptor cells aren’t identical, they’re both neurons and are a part of the neurological framework, so these cells could offer tantalizing clues. Obviously, testing both methods simultaneously is the smartest route. There’s also evidence that variations in quantum vibrations of structurally identical molecules changes their scent, so olfactory nerves could also be tested.

There was also a fascinating study (that has recently been very elusive on the net) showing that the reaction time of bats responding to echolocation cannot be explained by the standard neurological model, and is sadly being overlooked. They are apparently reacting to sounds faster than their brains should be able to process. Hopefully, I will master my Google-fu and find it.

Regarding quantum tunneling in biology, its already been shown to occur in plants, making photosynthesis the most efficient biological process known (~90%!). I find it extremely likely that it exists in some form for higher order creatures.

[ThePurpleBunny]

A Five-Dimensional Black Hole Could 'Break' General Relativity, Say Physicists

I just wanted to post this so we can chuckle at “naked singularity”.

[forte95]

I’ve had the pleasure to attend a talk by Dr. Ian Vega, who works as a theoretical physicist specializing in relativity. The talk was about their most recent paper at the time, which dealt with cosmic censorship.

The whole topic is interesting. Dr. Vega’s work was on extremal Reissner-Nordstrom black holes (black holes with a lot of charge).

The problem was that, if you had a black hole with enough charge, the EM repulsion could overpower the gravitational attraction, like so (excuse my Paint skills):

No matter how close you get to the black hole, charged particles would ALWAYS be repelled. So, there would exist certain charged particles that could get arbitrarily close to the singularity and still be emitted. The singularity could thus be readily seen/measured: a naked singularity.

Thankfully, such a black hole could not form spontaneously; you couldn’t pull that much charged material into such a confined space without them repelling each other and eventually flying off.

BUT, someone thought, what if you had a black hole with just barely enough charge, then throw in a charged particle?

The charged particle could tip the near-critical BH into nakedness: NOT GOOD.

But, as Dr. Ian Vega and his colleagues discovered (through very heavy math I didn’t understand), you couldn’t really throw in any charged particles, because the Lorentz self-force would actually push those particles out.

[details=Spoiler]Lorentz self-force is pretty complicated, but essentially it’s that when a charged particle moves, it causes a change in the electric field around it, which in turn causes a magnetic field to appear around it.

A charged particle moving through a magnetic field experiences a magnetic force. This magnetic force is given this special name, Lorentz self-force, because it looks as if the particle is applying a force on itself.

And as it turns out, in our scenario, this self force can directly oppose the motion of the particle itself.[/details]

So, it turns out we still can’t actually make a naked singularity, even when we try to cheat. Dr. Vega and his colleagues assert that this analysis can also be applied to overspinning Kerr black holes.

[details=Spoiler]Kerr black holes are black holes with a lot of spin angular momentum, as opposed to Reissner-Nordstrom black holes with a lot of charge.

There had also been arguments in which throwing in a spinning particle into a near-extremal Kerr black hole could create a naked singularity, but as Dr. Vega and his colleagues showed, this still wouldn’t be the case (spinning particles also experience a kind of self-force, but with a totally different mechanism from the Lorentz electromagnetic self-force).[/details]

[forte95]

News article on Passive Wi-Fi technology, which uses 10,000 times less power than conventional wi-fi methods.

What it is:

“We wanted to see if we could achieve Wi-Fi transmissions using almost no power at all,” said co-author Shyam Gollakota, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering. “That’s basically what Passive Wi-Fi delivers. We can get Wi-Fi for 10,000 times less power than the best thing that’s out there.”

Passive Wi-Fi can for the first time transmit Wi-Fi signals at bit rates of up to 11 megabits per second that can be decoded on any of the billions of devices with Wi-Fi connectivity. These speeds are lower than the maximum Wi-Fi speeds but 11 times higher than Bluetooth.

How it does it:

To achieve such low-power Wi-Fi transmissions, the team essentially decoupled the digital and analog operations involved in radio transmissions. In the last 20 years, the digital side of that equation has become extremely energy efficient, but the analog components still consume a lot of power.

The Passive Wi-Fi architecture assigns the analog, power-intensive functions - like producing a signal at a specific frequency—to a single device in the network that is plugged into the wall.

An array of sensors produces Wi-Fi packets of information using very little power by simply reflecting and absorbing that signal using a digital switch. In real-world conditions on the UW campus, the team found the passive Wi-Fi sensors and a smartphone can communicate even at distances of 100 feet between them.

My thoughts:

Very useful. Wi-Fi traditionally hogs a lot of battery power (for smartphones). 10,000 times less power is a huge thing.

It could also mean embedded systems (like refrigerator or washing machine microcontrollers) could more effectively connect to Wi-Fi, since they don’t have to worry about additional power. You could probably set up a literal “home” system where you control appliances from a Wi-Fi-connected PC.

I don’t know much about current embedded system technology though, all I know is that Arduinos can send text messages lol.

[forte95]

News article on hints of a new particle and possible explanations.

Why it’s making the news:

Hints of the new particle emerged last December at the Large Hadron Collider. Theorists have churned out hundreds of papers attempting to explain the existence of the particle —assuming it’s not a statistical fluke. Scientists are now beginning to converge on the most likely explanations.

“If this thing is true, it’s huge. It’s very different than what the last 30 years of particle physics looked like,” says theoretical physicist David Kaplan of Johns Hopkins University.

What it might be:

One of the most plausible explanations, scientists say, is that the particle is a composite, made up of smaller constituents, much like protons and neutrons are made of quarks. The strong nuclear force binds quarks in these nucleons; the new particle would be composed of quarklike particles held together by a new type of strong force. “I think that that’s the model that works the best with the data,” says theoretical physicist Kathryn Zurek of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

Why scientists are skeptical:

Additionally puzzling is that the particle doesn’t seem to easily solve any of the major mysteries of particle physics. It doesn’t provide an obvious explanation for dark matter, an unidentified substance that makes up more than 80 percent of the matter in the universe. And it doesn’t easily explain a persistent puzzle known as the hierarchy problem, which is related to the mass of the Higgs. According to theory, physicists would naively expect the Higgs to have an enormously large mass, but for unknown reasons, it is found at a much lower scale.

Many physicists had pinned their hopes for solving these problems on a theoretical concept called supersymmetry, which proposes that each known particle has a heavier partner. But although theorists have concocted supersymmetric explanations for the particle, it doesn’t seem to fit easily into that box, either. “This thing doesn’t smell like supersymmetry,” says Maria Spiropulu of Caltech, an experimental particle physicist with CMS.

The lack of simple explanations makes some physicists more skeptical that the particle really exists. Instead, they think it’s more likely just a blip that will disappear with more data. “If it had been something that was confidently expected in some well-motivated scenario like supersymmetry, then I think people would be a lot more confident about its reality,” says Ellis.

My thoughts:

It’d be funny if this actually were just a statistical blip. LHC will shortly be firing up to get more data, so we’ll find out more in time.

PS: I’ve been so focused on graduating that I haven’t found time to check with SRK. Seems like the science thread hasn’t been active lately. I’m down for a good discussion, so if anyone wants to open an interesting topic, fire away.

[white_shadow]

The event I and many others have been waiting for might happen soon!:

**
Astronomers Prepare For First Ever Black Hole Image With New Algorithm
**

Astronomers Prepare For First Ever Black Hole Image With New Algorithm

One interesting thing about black holes is that, well, we’ve never actually seen one. In fact, our only direct evidence that they exist came from the discovery of gravitational waves last year, in the form of two merging black holes.

But astronomers are now preparing to produce an image of a black hole, Sagittarius A* at the center of our Milky Way, thanks to an international collaboration called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). It will use nine radio telescopes around the world to create a virtual telescope with a much wider area, known as interferometry.

To make this work, though, requires a bit of trickery, and that’s where a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) comes in. They’ve developed an algorithm (described in a paper) that uses other images of space to create a mosaic of the combined observational data. It’s called CHIRP (Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors), and the result is that it should let us directly image a black hole.

“Suppose you want a high-resolution video of a baseball,” Yoav Schechner, a professor of electrical engineering at Israel’s Technion who was not involved in the paper, told MIT News. “The nature of ballistic trajectory is prior knowledge about a ball’s trajectory. In essence, the prior knowledge constrains the sought unknowns. Hence, the exact state of the ball in space-time can be well determined using sparsely captured data.”

One of the reasons we need such a large telescope is that black holes are very far away, and also very small. For example, Sagittarius A* is just 17 times the Sun’s diameter but 25,000 light-years away.

“[Taking a picture of the black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy is] equivalent to taking an image of a grapefruit on the Moon, but with a radio telescope,” said MIT graduate Katie Bouman, who led the algorithm’s development, to MIT News. “To image something this small means that we would need a telescope with a 10,000-kilometer diameter, which is not practical, because the diameter of the Earth is not even 13,000 kilometers.”

Using telescopes around the world will let astronomers in the EHT project achieve such a resolution. And the new CHIRP algorithm will be essential in piecing together all the observations to make this ambitious endeavor possible.

There’s no firm date in 2017 for when we can expect the first image yet, but there’s every reason to be excited for when it does get up and running.

“…And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” *

[StockyJam]

computer composite time lapse of Saturn’s orbit which takes 29 years.

http://i1132.photobucket.com/albums/m580/Axl_m4ster/Saturn_timelapse-29_years_zpsuxdeffxg.gif

[Reticently]

Cross-posting per @WTF-AKUMA-HAX request:

Doing it froggy style: Kermit Sutra’s seventh position revealed

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2093561-doing-it-froggy-style-kermit-sutras-seventh-position-revealed/

[ThePurpleBunny]

*"…And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you." *

What if I just turn around and moon the abyss.

You like that, abyss? Do ya, huh?

[ThePurpleBunny]

But speaking of black holes that I’m not showing mine to (hyuk hyuk), apparently Hawking is now saying there may be an escape from one.

No Escape From Black Holes? Stephen Hawking Points to a Possible Exit